The ancient drill idea is good. What if we could find things like old space probes and drills that was thought lost or destroyed a long time ago. And Em-8er is an ice planet so there might be heat heat drills on it with drones inside of them for looking under the ice. Again given this is a sci-fi game we can size up some of the idea NASA and have the drills be large enough to hold people and small mechs.
Note that in one of the idea for the ice is that inside the drill itself would be an UAV (submarine done) so that when the drill gets to the other side of the ice if there is enough water there the head of the drill will open up and the UVA would swim out and explore the waters.
Meaning that besides finding old drills we could also find old drones and vehicles. Besides the idea of them having or finding resources for us. They could also be upgrades to our mechs or have little person light vehicle options for the humans when we are not in our omniframes. Sure the technology might be old next to the omniframes and stuff, but that doesn't mean they are not still useful and powerful. After all, deep space probes are built to last and tend to be engineered with backup systems and like. If one of the old systems had an A.I. core then maybe it could tell us more about the things it seen on the planet and how thing was before we showed up. It could even be part of some mission to help the A.I. get somewhere it couldn't get to before do to damage or help it find it's partner A.I. that went missing some time ago after something like an earthquake or powerful storm.
P.s.
The A.I. thing is something that NASA is working on. Giving landers, drones, and probes A.I. with give them ability to act quickly on their own to avoid danger and gather information and/or samples without the need of having to wait from orders from the NASA team do to the long lag time between planets. Even at the speed of light there is long lag time when given and getting info between planets. Although if we can find out how things like quantum entanglement really works and if it works in the way that we think it might work, then lag time would be a think of past as you could talk to people real time on the other side of the universe with no lag.