Station allegiance somtimes null on old stations

[phkb]

According to the docs, if a station doesn't have an allegiance set specifically in its definition, then the game will take a guess based on other station properties. Unfortunately, it appears that sometimes its guess is "null", rather than one of the approved allegiance values. I've seen this in particular with the "Free Trade Zone" oxp, where sometimes the guess is "neutral", but at other times it gets a null value.

[Smivs]

I can see that some OXP stations may not (and indeed should not) have any 'allegiance'. It might be best if the game does not try to give allegiance at all where this is not specified, although I'm not sure whether 'null' does this anyway. TBH I'm not sure what 'null' even does.
Looking to the future, perhaps a 'None' allegiance should be available to OXP authors, and old OXPs which have not been updated should be considered and perhaps those where allegiance is not specified are automatically given a 'none' allegiance as this is probably better than having an in-appropriate allegiance given.

[phkb]

To my mind an allegiance of "neutral" would be the same as "none", but my understanding of politics is limited! However, as a default, and based on what the current options are, maybe "chaotic" should be selected (allowing everyone to dock) when no specific allegiance is given.

[spara]

I would also say that from the game perspective, every station needs an allegiance setting. And null should be interpreted as Chaotic. It just means everyone is allowed to dock.

[cim]

Every station should get an allegiance setting (and the default in the event of no particular clues on an old station is "neutral" at the moment) - but the way it sets it for old stations is that it won't set the allegiance of an old station until the first time an AI needs to know what that allegiance is, so it's possible depending on when you check the allegiance from a non-AI script, that nothing has yet set it.

"neutral" is in practice roughly how old AIs treated old stations, though either "chaotic" or "private" might also make reasonable defaults.