It's not a mod. You can recover them.

To recover pods you need to select a ship with empty crew slots (or a ship with no crew asides from the captain). And right click near where the escape pods are and select "recover crew" or something along those lines.

Once the pods are retrieved the crew members will appear in the "unassigned crew" section of the ships crew info panel. From there you can assign them to different ships and appropriate roles.

No, the point is, I've already recovered the crew, the pod is empty, other than the unknown captain. In a previous game save, I had a huge number of pods in the map, all empty and no way to get rid of them.

I haven't encountered these yet so apologies if these are dumb questions, but if they're already empty then can you not just shoot them? Or click on them and destroy them from the menu like beacons?

Check whether you have Escape Pod by Bion installed. Most likely that's the reason.

Originally posted by 💖 Officer Hotpants 💖:

I haven't encountered these yet so apologies if these are dumb questions, but if they're already empty then can you not just shoot them? Or click on them and destroy them from the menu like beacons?

Unable to destroy them via any menu, ect, or sell. Have not attempted to manually shoot them down, as that requires me to be in the same sector. Usually they all happen when i'm elsewhere.

Originally posted by nalsuR:

Check whether you have Escape Pod by Bion installed. Most likely that's the reason.

confirmed i do NOT have that installed, so that wouldn't be the cause for these.