Friendly faction skirmishes

[pref]

I don't exactly know how, but Antigone and Argons have a huge battle in Second Contact, destroyer groups with numerous escorts and supply ships killing each other.
ANT even attacked an argon defense station i have a HOP war mission for, so i'll just jump in and take the killing blow - so convenient, Antigone's going to be my best friend from now on

I just don't exactly know how i can trigger such events..? Does anyone know how this works so i can cause more havoc?

My best guess is that it's related to the carrier i have defending a HOP station across the gate in True Sight, which is a shipyard i designed with the sacred geometry in mind so i want HOP to finish the build.
This raptor has FF override for ANT and ARG, and is doing station defense. Probably an argon ship which belongs to their fleet in Second Contact got killed by my guys, so all the argon ships under the same commander went hostile in both sectors.
I just don't know how Antigone decided to get involved against the Argon..? Really like it, lends ANT an impression of an actual ally and i can play a local war with factions participating, not just a guy 3 gates away telling me to blow up a station or a helpless miner.
On average i don't get 2 strong groups to collide, it's more like a lone destroyer committing suicide on a carrier group plus a fortified station. But if i could choose which group attacks which without restrictions due to faction relations that would result in some really nice battles.

I haven't finished the ant/ter/arg war plot, so they are best buddies, and i got 30 rep with both of them (got some irukandji sector traders, i can kill anything and have my 30 rep back in few seconds or minutes in extreme cases).
Anyone knows how can i get this to happen in a planned manner? Earlier i killed a terran carrier group with ANT ships around but none of them came to help so i think it's not an unconditional reaction to me being attacked in their radar range.

Non modified game.

[Koizuki]

Were you nearby or had the area in high-attention (such as via Livestream) when the fight broke out?

There's usually a lot of ships around that HOP gate, and the most reasonable explanation is that while ARG and ANT were swarming HOP ships coming through the gate, some stray shots hit each other, and there was enough friendly fire to trigger at least one of them to turn temporarily hostile against the other, which then snowballs everything as more and more ships get involved. Usually things calm down and return to normal once everyone involved ends up destroying each other, and new replacements aren't hostile to continue the chain reaction.

[pref]

Were you nearby or had the area in high-attention (such as via Livestream) when the fight broke out?

First time i was in high attention for a time, but now it happened again in a distant sector.
This time my carrier killed some ant ships, so a couple turned red near the argon shipyard. I then noticed arg ships killing off the hostile ant ones that attacked my autotraders that tried to dock.
Was nowhere near the place. Maybe it's rep related?

[GCU Grey Area]

Maybe it's rep related?

Suspect that was the case for a recent skirmish between otherwise friendly factions in my game. At high rep levels factions 'may decide to send patrol ships to areas in which your assets have been repeatedly attacked'. In this case it was some MIN ships which had started shooting at one of my freighters (presumably a false positive cargo scan?). Was OOS when it started, however when I arrived in the sector to intervene discovered TEL fighters were already dealing with the problem for me.

[Koizuki]

I'm not totally clear on how the reputation levels affect things, but it is possible that they were responding to hostile actions against you. The problem is that I feel like "sending patrols" to your assets simply redirects a group to a sort of 'defend position' bubble near you, but they should still be operating under their own factions' hostility rules, so ARG shouldn't actively attack ANT even if they are harrassing you. I'll have to pay closer attention to this next time if I see it happening. I simply assume it's high-attention stray shots since I'm usually flying back and forth on my Katana or Moreya pretty often between managing the empire.

[pref]

Maybe you need maxed rep for this to happen..?
I like having devoted "friends", though can see why some folks wouldn't want a peaceful sector getting leveled by such a conflict. Second Contact is especially nice for this, ant and arg both can field strong forces there. They destroyed 4 stations, and i got my exceptional engine mod too for a PAR or HOP mission!
Ant half destroyed a mission target station for me..

[Koizuki]

In my current game I am at +30 relations with all the major factions, plus most of the pirate factions as well, so nothing really attacks me anymore outside of the occasional SCA that manages to find one of my non-miraged Prometheuses.
This does mean that I have "extra patrols" from basically everyone converging into my assets, which does sometimes trigger ARG/ANT vs ZYA fights when they run into each other, but I haven't seen anything recently that causes friendly factions to turn on each other, especially since I haven't flown through Second Contact in a while.

I'll have to spend some time looking around my game to see if I can catch anything like this happening while OOS.

[pref]

I'll have to spend some time looking around my game to see if I can catch anything like this happening while OOS.

Don't think you'll see that unless they are hostile.
Kill 1-2 of their ships that belong to a bigger fleet, which is next to another 30rep friend's of yours. Then let them attack one of your ships.
Maybe it works, just guessing. But this is how it happened in my game on both occasions.

[Koizuki]

If that's the case, then it's reasonably probable the response to hostiles attacking you is what is setting them off. I don't have any reason to go out of my way to attack friendly NPCs so I haven't thought about trying that.