Abandoned ships and (probably) escorts

[Screet]

Hi,

I just ran into the final stage of a thargoid attack on a big bulk of trading ships...and did have quite some cargo readings around me, thus I scooped up what I could and found an abandoned Cobra. I thought this would be a great thing to get some free cargo, however a Mamba didn't like me to shoot up that abandoned ship and attacked me...the Mamba was clean. I guess it was an escort of the abandoned craft? If so, is this really the behaviour that should be there? Those ships cannot be salvaged, thus the logical thing would be to move on and ignore the ship that has been escorted before?

Screet

[Frame]

Hi,

I just ran into the final stage of a thargoid attack on a big bulk of trading ships...and did have quite some cargo readings around me, thus I scooped up what I could and found an abandoned Cobra. I thought this would be a great thing to get some free cargo, however a Mamba didn't like me to shoot up that abandoned ship and attacked me...the Mamba was clean. I guess it was an escort of the abandoned craft? If so, is this really the behaviour that should be there? Those ships cannot be salvaged, thus the logical thing would be to move on and ignore the ship that has been escorted before?

Screet

Derelict ships, will still carry their primary role, or at least they used to, but I know from how the fuel collector works that derelict ships still carry their roles... so if the derelict ship was of type pirate and had attacked the mamba or the ship escorted, it would still be a target in the Mamba´s AI, it does not check for if the ship has a pilot... and the mamba may be the ship that forced the pilot to eject, so the kill would be rightfully his... At least that is what any human player would do, if his cargo hold was full... A mamba has perhaps 5 tons of cargo space.. I can't recall, but not much, that i know...

[Eric Walch]

When the mother of an escorted group gets attacked, the system automatically sends a ATTACK message to all its escorts. It is than upon the AI to react on this attack.
When the escorts are in escort mode they will not react on this ATTACK message. Their mother has to explicit put the escorts in a interceptAI. And as a derelict has no AI, we can conclude the escorts were not in escort mode.

When not escorting or attacking, escorts are constantly searching for new mothers. One of the requirements is that they must have similar scan classes. When it finds the closest with a same scan class it keeps asking if it will be accepted as escort. The escort won't accept no and keeps negotiating with the closest ship in range. Only when an other ship comes closer it switches target until it finds a ship that accepts him or find no ship at all. In that last case it starts hunting. So, when you had waited enough, the mamba would have frown away.

Its probably a bug that the group ID's are not reset. When it finds a new mother it gets a new group ID, but I think that when it becomes a hunter it will still keep reacting on attacks of its derelict mother.

And in my opinion it is a bug that the escorts keep on negotiating with the closest ship, even when the miss that way an opportunity to escort a further away mother.