terraforming ship bug

[eponymous]

hi i'm playing 7. 1, and my terraforming TG is invariably getting lost within days of arriving at a colony site

mercury is a colony site, albeit with no people- this is very early in the game.   i send a little squadron of terraforming ships there with a "move" order (and no subsequent orders) and under "special orders" i have it set to "terraform colony".   k, i hit a single five day tick, the group is where it's supposed to be, mercury is showing the terraforming installations, swell.   next tick, and the tf TG now has "move to #546" listed as it's plotted order and either then or on the next 5 day tick the ships are no longer listed as around mercury.   in one instance they had been teleported to luna.   i shrugged my shoulders and started terraforming luna and the #546 thing recurred.   i've tried moving the ships elsewhere and back, for a 5 second tick and for a 5 day one.   i've deleted the whole TF, "fast OOB"ed replacements in.

i've tried setting them to picket mercury, makes no difference.   as i said, i've tried to terraform luna (which has a nonzero population, of only one species), and gotten the same result.   i'm not going to lie, it's pretty frustrating.   

[Tree]

The default order makes  them automatically seek a colony to terraform, I have no idea what kind of colony they're looking for exactly. You have to stop giving them a default order. Moving them to Mercury is enough.
Also if you move more ships there by telling a task group to join the one over Mercury, once they've joined you will have to give the order to move to Mercury to the whole group again, then a 5 seconds turn would be enough. The new arrivals won't be taken into account otherwise.

[MarcAFK]

Terraforming with ships is a matter of
A) design and build ships with terraforming modules.
B) send the ships to the planet you want terraformed, there needs to be a colony there.
c) open the colony's production screen and manually set what gas to add or remove from the planet.
Every 5 days a tiny bit more gas will be altered. It will take a long time unless you have a lot of ships. Using installations is the same but requires a large population present.