I always thought that the admin team stopped giving out Dc's 3-4 years ago.. but then I stumbled across Nova Industries...
Nova Industries

Type: Items
Founded On: Year 11 Day 82

And they have Dc's.... I did some research and found a few more founded on Year 11 that had Dcs... So my question is.... When did they stop assigning Dc's??? or When did they just Selectively stop assigning them?

It is possible that they merged the old faction that they had DC's in and joined into a new faction, dissolving the "original" and having the DC's in the current faction.

Key Example
Aurora Technologies
Type: Ships
Founded On: Year 12 Day 201

Started as
Aurora Technologies (AT1)
Merged into
Kaos SOMETHING
Merged into
Aurora Technologies (AT2)

Now AT2 houses the DCs that once belonged to AT1

As Zero said, the only unique DCs (rather than the generic ones such as the medical ones) that have been given out since the original lot in year 7 or something, have been the Nova Crystal to Krath and the Shockball Glove to Ailon Nova Guard (which incidentally was merged into GE and has since been lost again...). These 2 were added purely for RP situations.

Item DC Distribution occurred around this time based on the Sim News Archive. As for the others. Just go reading thru the GNS flashnews and/or sim news.

New factions and datacards
(Posted by Tyr DeMeer on Year 8 Day 16 4:31)
Right now there are a number of unassigned weapons and item datacards. These cards are to be handed out to new production groups. Its been decided that there will be room for 2 weapon factions and 5 item factions.

The handout process will look a bit different this time. Factions will not be able to send in any wishlist. Instead I will use a random generator. Will simply assign all the available datacards a number, then I will use the random generator to hand them out one by one to the available factions. Groups will ofcourse share some things while others may be unique.

Vehicles:

Vehicle datacard handout done!
(Posted by Tyr DeMeer on Year 7 Day 218 10:01)
yes indeed,
The vehicle datacard handout process has now finished. The results can be found at the rulespages.

This means that all types of datacards has been taken care off. Droids, weapons, items and so on.

Ah thanks that's cleared quite a bit up. So I'm guessing that they new process for acquiring Dc's is going to be through R&D or something along those lines right?

R&D will be the major way to get DCs. While there have been discussions of generic DCs being handed out on creation, it has not been fully planned or implemented in any way.

The whole DC system is a bit broken, giving DC's to factions just because they happened to be around at a certain time is...bad. On a lot of levels.

If I took a reasonable idea to the suggestions forum about them though, it'd be closed:(

Shuji... everyone knows that Datacards has been a restricted topic. Just because YOU think it's reasonable, the fact that it's restricted makes it UNREASONABLE.

Besides this isn't even about further Datacard distribution just a question as to when they occurred and how they will occur once R&D comes out. Besides that, you ALL READY brought up the idea and it got locked. So move on.

On a side note, they didn't secretly stop handing out the datacards, there was the Sim News posts ;)

Well I agree with the idea that handing them out is unfair........... yet if the game designers want this to make sense (which I know they do and please don't write me off as a troll I honestly respect the work you all do.)there ought to be a way for factions who have items/weapons/ships with the faction's name in the description, to get them. I know that sounds like it's exploiting the game to start a faction with a name just to get Dc's but........... technically didn't every faction before year 7 pretty much do that? Is there a harm in allowing access to dc's that have a Cannon reason to belong to a faction? I only use the term cannon as a point because i've seen it pop up by many different admin's describing R&D.......
For example...... if i started a faction that had a ship described in it as one of there designs shouldn't we be able to have teams of scientists toil in a lab for weeks/months to find a design that's similar to that ship? Perhaps it has less weapons.. or a different style to it? like the way how the YT line evolved.

Yes. That's called R&D.

Oh lol I didn't think that was how they were going to handle the situation.. Thanks Mikel