Err, it does work ok in most cases, unless some people bolt on the wrong AI onto a ship. As Eric said, the AI Caracal was putting on those pirates is called in-game only after a target is acquired.
While that specific AI tries to figure out why it doesn't have a target, it tends not to notice incoming obstacles & has a ship crash. Myself, I've seen RL people with similar skills as that AI!
Still, Caracal, Star Gazer, if you've got the time & patience to tweak the AI to cope with this specific situation, one that can only happen inside untested OXPs (or semi-random trial & error with the debug console), we're always more than happy to welcome new developers on board!
I've seen a Viper crash lately when I was running at TAF: x16 and using the Torus or injectors to approach the main station from deep space at a right angle.
The Viper usually crashes before I get within 10km of it.
If the TAF value is reduced to 2 or lower and/or I quit using injectors, it seems MUCH less likely for Vipers to crash.
Ai ships seem to imitate what other ships are doing...if I'm injecting, they often do to.
I've seen a Viper crash lately when I was running at TAF: x16 and using the Torus or injectors to approach the main station from deep space at a right angle.
There you've given your own answer. As a rule, all AIs suffer from high TAFs. The higher your TAF, the worse ships behave (you will also see escorts completely break formation and wandering away, among other things).
The reason is that NPCs check their environment at fixed intervalls, the shortest of which is 0.125 seconds (or 1/8 second). What the TAF effectively does is skipping some checks. TAF 2 means that every other check is skipped, in TAF 4 it is three out of four, and with TAF 16 only one check out of every 16 is actually performed. So instead of eight times a second, the NPC only reacts to anything thrown at it after 2 seconds (1/8 * 16). And that's too clumsy for subtle manoeuvring.
In other words: the TAF by design works with reducing the precision of NPC-actions and reactions. Therefore it is no wonder that NPCs will crash under high TAFs. Personally I only accelerate Oolite in order to span great distances when I'm alone. Whenever something comes into scanner range, I go back to TAF 1.
I've seen a Viper crash lately when I was running at TAF: x16 and using the Torus or injectors to approach the main station from deep space at a right angle.
There you've given your own answer. As a rule, all AIs suffer from high TAFs. The higher your TAF, the worse ships behave (you will also see escorts completely break formation and wandering away, among other things).
Yes, there is just less time to do proper calculations at TAF: x16. When you normally have a fps value of 50, you might expect that the system behaves as one of 50/16 = 3.1 fps. So it will miss a lot of collision checks at that speed.
Personally I only accelerate Oolite in order to span great distances when I'm alone. Whenever something comes into scanner range, I go back to TAF 1.
I'm using x16 to cross the void using the torus from the beacon to the station. Almost impossible to use faster than TAF 2x anywhere else anyway.
Far from it! I never use time acceleration between beacon and station. Only if I want to visit objects at least five or ten times as far away than that distance. Or to test just how far out you have to get in order to make the sun shrink to a single pixel. That takes a considerable amount of time even with torus drive and TAF 16. And you never see another soul out there.
That's not to refute my point, only that you don't feel the witchpoint beacon to the station is very far. It's only about 1-2 minutes using a Cobra 3, but in a Python it seems like about double that time and I'm wanting to cover that distance fast. I'm doing it away from the trade lane or I'd get massblocked every few seconds.
At some systems, the beacon-to-station distance is considerably shorter than others. The game's system populator still puts as many ships in there as it would in "regular" systems, which makes for a very crowded run...especially if it's an anarchy or multi-government! 2-5 pirate groups could see you and attack at once. There might also be 5 "flights" of 3-9 Vipers on radar at the same time.
I've tried to maneuver with TAF set to 16, but it's basically impossible. It's only good for covering very large straight distances.
And you never see another soul out there. 
