Looks like AI can’t deal with damaged ships

[Ekaton (OP)]

Just entered my first alien system and I noticed that there are many ships along the way - some alone, some in groups, all going at 1 km/s. At first I thought that the enemy might be trying to hide, but after boarding one and having one surrender to me, I noticed that they have damaged engines, among other things. They all had 1% MSP left. Is AI unable to deal with damaged ships?

Also, one of the ships destroyed seconds after it was successfully boarded, why? The event menu stated that it was attack by an unknown vessel but there were none in the area.

EDIT: The ship that surrendered suffered a catastrophic failure and exploded seconds after surrendering as well.

[Barkhorn]

Sounds to me like a bug.  Your ships can explode if they suffer too many maintenance failures without repair.  Each ship has a certain hit-to-kill number, which is how much internal damage must be dealt to destroy the ship.  Maintenance failures and combat damage both count the same for this.

If the AI are immune to maintenance failure explosions, but not maintenance failures, their ships will become disabled, which is what you saw.  Then, once they surrender, they become yours and "realize" they're below their HTK and blow up.

[Jorgen_CAB]

The AI currently don't maintain ships like the player does. Steve have said that he would like to add this to the game eventually so AI need to maintain ships as well as use fuel as it currently will need to use fuel.

So this is just an artefact of the AI never suffering maintenance failures but the player will as soon as they take over the ship.

Perhaps the AI should repair component for no cost as long as it does not manage its maintenance, just so things like this don't happen and the AI do repair damaged ships fully eventually. I don't think this would hurt the game as long as the AI don't maintain their ships anyway and don't really deal with MSP.

[Steve Walmsley]

The NPRs don't have to worry about maintenance, but they will repair their ships in shipyards after suffering damage.

[Ekaton (OP)]

I’m still exploring enemy sectors and I haven’t found their capital yet, or any inhabited bodies apart from some asteroids, so it may be possible that the system with many immobile ships was simply cut off from shipyards.

This doesn’t explain why there were so many ships on the verge of destruction without previous fighting in this system, or why some of them were in clusters of up to 3 immobile ships in one place, in the middle of nowhere. It is possible, as this race would keep on jumping through that jumpgate into my system for one 5 second tick, disappearing before I could fire, but reappearing a few hours later - this time being fired upon as I kept FC assignments - they were fired upon in the same 5 second tick they appeared. It is possible that some of these ships were damaged but not destroyed and ultimately broke down.