So The whole expedition thing to get the Normandy is actually a bit broken. For those that don’t know, the expedition mode is it’s own thing, you don’t use your normal save stuff in it.
Basically everybody gets dumped with a random character in the same area of space. There are five ‘phases’ and each phase has several tasks in it to complete. A task may be ‘Find a crashed freighter’ or ‘learn 10 words of Gek’. Fairly straightforward if you now the game well. You get rewards for each task and for completing each phase and they’re actually pretty generous, so it’s kind of ‘power levelling’ you as it does it - for example one reward might be a freighter plus five hyperwarp cells which means you don’t have to faff about trying to get the better drives for your spaceship and can just get on with what they’re asking you to do.
In the current expedition, you get the Normandy as a frigate in all your saves if you get to the end of phase five.
The issue is one of the tasks in phase four. Bear in mind by then you’re actually pretty end game - it’s given you a freighter, an A class starship and a good few S class upgrades, plus you’ll probably have several million credits plus a few thousand nanites in the bank. And you’ll have done about 20 tasks already.
The task that breaks things is in phase four - ‘discover 10 systems’ i.e. warp to 10 systems nobody has previously been to.
Pretty easy you’d think - infinite universe, billions of systems etc. Piece of cake.
what you’re missing is the important start condition - everybody starts in the same place. what this does is effectively turn the expedition into a wierd kind of pyramid scheme. if you were in at the beginning, when the whole part of space was undiscovered, it was dead easy. if you’re doing it now, after thousands of pilots have been crawling around the area of space for a couple of weeks, all trying to discover the 10 new systems they need, you’re pretty much stuffed. There just aren’t that many systems left that somebody hasn’t already ‘pinched’.
The normal solution to this would be the drop through a back hole, which would dump you into a whole different area of space where hopefully you could ge the task ticked off, and then use a space station warp gate to get back to where you started. But the black holes appear to currently be broken. I tried three black holes in three different systems and they all had the same system as their destination point. That means they’re effectively no use at all.
Upshot : if you haven’t already got the Normandy, you’re almost certainly not going to be able to get it. Boo hiss.