Factory's ships aren't delivering their goods

[English_S]

Does anyone else have the following problem and if so have you found a solution or is it just a bug?

I've set up several single factories and complexes now, but in some cases the ships I assign to buy goods won't deliver them The factory has money, the maximum jumps is set to 2 and there are nearby supplies of the product, the ships all have their home base set to the right factory, they have all the relevant trading software installed but there's a problem...

The ships will go out, buy the product (i.e. energy cells) and then rather than returning to base to supply the factory it will sit in space doing nothing. In the factory's "owned ships" screen the command I gave the ship displays correctly but there is no destination quoted; it says "ETA 00:00" and when I check the freight bay it is full of what I told it to buy. It indicates that there is no more product available at that price. Fair enough, so why won't the ship return home with what it has??

Every time this happens I have to order the ship to return home and then manually unload the goods and send it out again. This keeps grinding my factories to a halt. I have checked that the same thing happens whether I'm in or OOS.

I'm sure I read another post from someone who said it just fixed itself eventually but I've had the same problem for more than 2 weeks now. It's not just with one specific factory either.

Does anyone have any suggestions or have you experienced this before? I'm guessing it could just be a bug, but if so I would have expected to hear more about it. I'd rather not have to micromanage all my factories.

Thanks in advance

[English_S]

My bad. Turns my factories are working properly and I was just too impatient to notice. After my freighters were filling their holds with wares they were temporarily sitting in space doing nothing, but eventually they did return home and deliver the goods. What narked me was that while a couple of them were doing this they'd been shot to pieces by passing Khaak/pirates. I'd started interfering early and manually ordered them home before they decided to do it themselves.

If anyone else gets this issue, be patient. It'll go away

[Conan1]

I actually have this problem.

One complex is set to buy silicon at 360 credits at a maximum distance of 2 gates. Another complex sell these at 350 credits but the automated transporters do not want to go the silicon complex.

(There is enough money to buy the product and all complexes are mine).

Am I missing something here?

[ascmesomething]

Conan1, your problem is your own ships can't "buy" from your own stations