Another ship!?

Played the demo with my brother and loved it. Immediately bought a copy. As it was a late Sunday night I didn't expect to get more people to play, but downloaded it and booted it up anyway. I decided to see how difficult it would be to play this single player while my brother was still downloading the game. Found it nearly impossible to play very effectively but it was a low difficulty so it didn't matter all that much. Took out two of the last three ships with a mine and had the very last ship on my tail and saw that there was a black hole nearby. Of course, it would be awesome to kite him around the black hole and see if I could avoid getting sucked in myself. Set a course for the black hole and then suddenly a purple named ship appears on my screen. Its okay: I have a nuke left. I spin around facing them both and am waiting for the nuke to load into the tubes when the red enemy ship is destroyed and the game is over. Apparenlty my brother had finished downloading and jumped into his own ship (since I was controlling all positions in my own ship) and he had come to my "rescue".

Played a few more times on the same ship with him as Helm and Weapons and me as Captain and everything else. It was twice as fun playing with a partner. It was awesome and I can't wait to play again with more people. As there is little chance of getting friends to actually bring over computers we'll probably be playing on a skype conference call.

What's that thing that looks like a crystal-studded ball and shows up as a question mark on the science scanner?