I wonder what it is in a script that creates these large groups of GalCop vessels?
Have you ever heard the word "escort"?
Each ship which may have escorts (notably ships with roles "trader" or "police") gets a random number of escorts when spawned. Random means a number between 0 and 6.
So, if you've got one police ship, and the game engine gave it randomly six escorts, the result is exactly as seen in the screenshots. And it is just the same as for the typical Anaconda with six escorts.
what makes them form a formation, tho, as opposed to stringing out in a big line, or is it pure chance? my Dominatrixes were definitely holding a defined "Vulcan" formation as opposed to the escorts i've seen w/ traders that just seem to take up a position at the side of the ship.
oooh....a formations OXP would be nice purely for local colour. you could have the Vipers/cops in a "V" formation, maybe something else n a finger-4, or a ring formation etc.
what makes them form a formation, tho, as opposed to stringing out in a big line, or is it pure chance?
The escort AI. You can influence the shape of the formation by resetting the minimum distance which escorts try to maintain to their mother/previous escort. With the default of 0 a group of mother plus 2 or 4 escorts form the well-known V-shape. Escorts number 5 and 6 fly inwards of escorts 3 and 5, therefore breaking up the V, which would otherwise extend unlimitedly.
Surprisingly this is a part of Oolite that's still hard-coded.
The four primary escort positions are at -2x,-1z +2x,-1z -3x,-3z and +3x,-3z - which are then scaled up by a factor three and repeated if there are more than four escorts.
This should probably be recoded to allow for more varied formations, read from the mothership's shipdata entry.
"The planet Rear is scourged by well-intentioned OXZs."
Um yes, but I think I should have been clearer in my question. I was more curious about reason for these, though I now know it is an escort issue for ships of various roles. I thought that there might be some in-game reason for these formation s of Vipers: like a potential Thargon raid or something.
