After some thought, I think my next playthrough will be with the Federation Cruiser. As much as I'm interested in the Zoltan ship, I really can't turn down the cool laser weapon lol. The first episode with the new ship will likely be up tomorrow or the day after.
Out of curiosity though, is there some rhyme or reason to where the homeworlds appear? For example, is there always a homeworld at a certain numbered sector? Or are the sectors which are at the edge of the map more likely to be homeworlds, etc? I assume that each racial ship tends to be unlocked in their respective homeworld?
I want to know this too, I've been trying to unlock the mantis/stealth ships because those are the only ones that require me to have specific crew members, yet I only find the homeworlds around half the time and when I do I get unlucky finding the beacon.
As far as I can tell though, it's just a completely unbiased random chance to find them anywhere past the second sector. I used to think the edges were more common but I'm not sure any more. If it's any help, rock/mantis are red, slug is blue, and engi/zoltan are green. And yes, you assumed correctly, with the exception that the engi one unlocks a federation ship for some reason. Oh, and the Zoltan and Rock quests are quite easy, I completed them both in the same run, on the first try too.
I have no idea how it actually works. But, looking at sector_data.xml, I see some "minSector" values in there.
So if I had to
guess, I'd say some sector types have minimum sector numbers before they're generated.
Sectors that have minSector values that aren't 0 are:
Final: Minsector 7.
Engi home: Minsector 2.
Mantis home: Minsector 2.
Slug home: Minsector 3.
Slug sector: Minsector 3.
Zoltan sector: Minsector 1.
Zoltan home: Minsector 2.
Rock sector: Minsector 1.
Rock home: Minsector 4.
Do note, since "Final" is 7 when there are at least 8 sectors if I recall correctly, the game engine could be counting the sectors as one number lower than what it says in-game.