My problem (?) with nomads is that there's good way to ... access one once it's moved out of range of your territory. They become incredibly difficult to defend, as you can't quickly move units onto it, etc.
Which is fine but it makes utilizing more than one almost impossible. I've got them, the blade (I thought? I've seen no journals about it), and spire shards turned on and I've had to reload from an autosave at least five times now just because I lost Nomad 1 (and thus lost the irreplaceable beacon). On two other occasions I lost the command station, but the stationed fleet ships were enough to bring the threat under control to recolonize (I keep a selection of remains rebuilders on the other side of the gravity well). I'm constantly on skirting the edge of low-power and have ~20 converters going (and still 4 digit income; full caps of engineers can't build spire city modules/foldouts/ships fast enough).
I colonized a second, for the ARS and spire archive that was on it, but I abandoned it when it moved out of range.