I Think Fleet Ghosting can Fix an Automatic Ship Replacement Bug

[Targ Collective]

When a ship is destroyed the new ship is placed immediately with everything except location and mobility dummied out - no model, no collision, no weapon AI - to give subordinates AI to follow. Always has surviving fleet leader formation. When the replacement ship is reasonably close the dummy AI snaps to the new ship. AI shouldn't drop formation because it will have location data to follow if a subordinate catches up too soon.

When a ship is a fleet component it is randomly assigned an ID in NNN-LLL format which may or may not be shown to the player and two three digit numbers for an additional NNN-NNN format. The first ID is a wing address. The second two numbers store Service Crew and Marine complements and are updated when crew changes but not changed for ejected survivors. Every ship replaced by the same replacement ship; even custom names would snap correctly, and unless you introduce thousand-crew ships the crew digits only need three numbers anyway.

Two reference numbers and ghosting can fix this. Missile rearming could reasonably be handled by fleet support logistics; simply having missile turrets handle a value of zero would rearm properly.

I've reported already that ships can't use tracking and dumbfire missile turrets at the same time. I suggest allowing turrets a missile slot for each, and resupplying to a 50/50 balance for both equipped missiles.

I'm hoping this will be useful, my DXDIAG and Vulkaninfo have changed and I'll update you as soon as a save file becomes relevant. Apologies for my earlier rudeness - I was really stressed out at the time.

Nota Bene: Replenishing deployables with automatic resupply would also be possible with additional NNN-NNN strings, with each string allowing storage of any two items under the thousand bound. These numbers could update to existing ships if missing data and could be used for resupply runs by only changing on resupply - AI will simply duplicate the data making this quite backwards compatible and if changed by resupply will take the new number. Many deployables are not AI linked but lasertowers at least should have this.

Nota Bene: More than one NNN-NNN might confuse things but there can be more than ten values to a letter. So LNN-NNN then NLN-NNN and so on would give a good layer of filtration which would give six values. Use of dual letters would give more values. If the computer skips an instruction and loads the wrong number-letter schema then each value having a unique format would harden the data back to the correct kind of value.