What happens when a construction ship leaves a jump gate construction task before it's finished? Does a partially constructed gate remain, for which any construction ship can take up where the first left off? Or does the 99% completed jump gate mystically dematerialize?
What's going on is that I've got an NPR building a jump gate in a system that I've got lots going on in. The construction ships' sensors must be pretty bad, since I've been watching them build away. Recently, though, the construction ships detected some of my traffic coming out of the WP in question - it seems they got scared and ran away; they took up a course directly opposite to mine for ~20 seconds, then headed back to the WP (presumably when they lost contact). If they really were working on a jump gate, would it have gone the way of the dodo? Or could they be finishing it off.
On an NPR/AI side note - there's two of these ships. They built a gate on one side of the WP (btw, that's another event we should probably have "new jump gate detected"), then jumped through and sat on the other side. I never noticed any cargo ships bringing in jump gate components, on the other hand, they're much higher tech and somewhat bigger than my construction ships (albeit much faster too) so maybe they have on-board cargo holds (or NPR don't need components to build jump gates). Is it possible that they jumped into a system where they're trapped (no components to build a jump gate) or that they're trapped now that they ran away (because the jump gate evaporated and they don't have new components)? Actually, I guess this is a bit of a moot point, since jump gates don't require components in 4.1.
One more thing I just realized - is the squadron size for a jump gate infinite? That would give a pretty big tactical advantage to building a jump gate into a system you want to attack. Also, what's the scatter radius for a jump gate? I've actually been assuming it's zero.
John
PS - Did you ever decide on a mechanism to "blow" jump gates?