Ships relocated to great distances

[elcheffo]

As this is my first post here, I want send my greetings up front.

Now to my issue: I am in the process of building a shipyard in Second Contact VII. At some point, I noticed that the build progress had stopped, necessary resources were missing. Looking into the resources overview on the build menu, I could see that all the required resources were already reserved. Some of the resoucre deliveries should be due in 5:00, others in 18:00. After waiting a little while, the values did not decrease as expected .

To speed up gathering the required resources, I tried re-assigning some of the traders of that station for trading with the build storage. At that point, I noticed that I could not find all of that transporters. Also, zooming out the map, I could see that the sector was explored to its borders in several straight rays. Ultimately, I could find one of the missing transporters, which was displayed two sectors away (though still being considered to be in Second Contact VII). So I searched for the second missing transporter, but could not find it on the map.
I then marked it as navigation target. A line was drawn accross the whole map, disappearing in the upper right corner while the map was fully zoomed out. Switching into cockpit view, the transporter was shown to be some billion km away .

Having considered them a loss (I sold them), I tried using some of the remaining transporters. I assigned some to manually exchange wares with the build storage and observed it. It said, my transporters would arrive in 0:02 to 0:03. However, those values did not decrease either, so I tried observing said transporters and they were actually flying around, docking at stations and gathering the resources as I told them to. Eventually, the neared the build storage. A further look into the pending deliveries showed them to be due in 0:01 to 0:02.

Apparently that view was not showing <minutes>:<seconds> but <hours>:<minutes>! That means, that the outstanding deliveries of some ANT and ARG transporters are still on their way, taking up to 18 hours... I guess some of those transporters have been relocated similar to my "lost" transporters.

Has anyone observed anything similar?

Also my transporters finally arrived at the build storage, but are now waiting in line to drop off their loads (apparently they cannot overtake each other)...

[Alan Phipps]

Hello and welcome. There are a few similar issues that the devs are aware of. Recent examples here, here and here.

Unfortunately, not knowing when this issue is about to happen reliably makes it almost impossible for players to provide useful saves for the devs to investigate the real cause and fix it.

[elcheffo]

Thanks for the reply.

My issue seems most related to the third link (Ships get regularily teleported far outside the universe in Matrix #451).

Sadly, I have not directly observed the issue occuring - I only reconstructed from observed results. Therefore, I do not have any meaningful saves.

However, it might have to do with station positioning: the build storage is pretty close to actual station structure. This was caused by the station's build progress. In the beginning, when building the E-Dock, it was ok, but with progressing station construction, at some point the shipyard XL was built pretty close to where the build storage is. It could be, that there were ships there, when the module was about to be built. Until that point, being there would have been a valid location to wait in line for accessing the build storage.

Also, as described in Tamina's post, I was the sector in which this happened. I will observe it, and see, if I can force it to happen again.

[elcheffo]

And another addition: I found yet another ship to be teleported out of the mappable sector area. Apparently, this happened more often then I thought in the beginning. The rays of explored space seem to be caused by ships moving back into the sector. So they were not just accelerated outwards, they were actually teleported.

That makes a total of at least 8 ships, having caused an exploration trail on their way back, as well as 2 ships, which I sold when they were far away and now the latest one, which is currently on its way back (it was not that far away).

[Imperial Good]

Are you using version 2.60? This was a well known issue around release that should have been fixed by now.

If this is occurring frequently then consider uploading your save to see if others can reproduce the problem.

[elcheffo]

Yes, I observed this on 2.60, at least for one of my transporters that ought to manually transfer wares.

Anyways, I started that save on 2.5, so this has happend with at least 2.5.