Official v5.20 Bugs Thread

[sloanjh]

That reminds me I've found ships with 2 commanders assigned recently.  Unassign one and there is another assigned as well.  I discovered this when manually destroying fighters so that I could replace them with newer versions.

Yep - I think this is the same bug.

I think there's something going on in the auto-assign logic that isn't telling the 1st commander that he's been relieved, so he thinks he's still in command.  Whatever this bug is, I've been seeing it for years (IRL) so I suspect that we're doing something different from Steve (otherwise he'd have noticed it too and tracked it down).  I know that I go through and do a lot of manual re-assignment after the auto-assign pass, since I don't like a lot of the choices the computer makes.

John

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

This might have been reported earlier.
When you scrap one of your own ships, its captain is still listed as being assigned to the now nonexisting ship.
I scraped all ships of two classes, so I could look through all of my officers (which was a bit of a hassle) and manually unasign them. Now that I know about this, I can unasign them before scraping, still, it would be nice if the officers would return to the pool automaticaly.

Fixed for v5.40. Ship and fighter commanders are unassigned when their ship/fighter is scrapped or deleted. If the ship is in orbit of a population, they are placed at that population.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

This also happens when a Replacement btn is used up; I've just found a GF commander with the same bug.

Fixed for v5.40. Commanders of expended replacement battalions are now unassigned.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

And there's still something funky going on with auto-assign.  I've repeatedly had the case where an officer thinks he's assigned to a ship, but the ship doesn't know he's assigned (and I'm pretty sure that he's not a passenger - he doesn't show up as "unassigned" in the skills filter unless I explicitly unassign him).

John

Have you noticed any pattern to this bug or does it seem to be random ships that are affected?

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I was about to post the same bug.  Also, whilst a ship is being scrapped it is still a valid command assignment; so you end up unassinging and then after the next 5 days increment, an officer is assigned to the ship if it is still being scrapped  It is somewhat annoying.

This should correct itself now. If a ship is scrapped or deleted in v5.40, its commander will be unassigned at that point and will be auto-assigned during the next 5-day increment.

Steve

[sloanjh]

And there's still something funky going on with auto-assign.  I've repeatedly had the case where an officer thinks he's assigned to a ship, but the ship doesn't know he's assigned (and I'm pretty sure that he's not a passenger - he doesn't show up as "unassigned" in the skills filter unless I explicitly unassign him).

Have you noticed any pattern to this bug or does it seem to be random ships that are affected?

No.  It seems to be sporadic.  Like I said above, I tend to do a lot of manual rearranging after auto-assign, so that might be putting things in a weird state.  The only other thing I've been able to think of is maybe there's a (leftover) filter that prevents a captain from being relieved if he's in orbit of a body (I don't have any observations to back this up, though), i.e. the auto-assign tells the ship he's gone but then aborts in the middle of telling him.  On the other hand, I think I remember it happening to PDC commanders (I could be wrong about this, though).  How's that for minimal hard data?

John

[sloanjh]

I'm playing around this game with small commercial bases (no engines) for picketing and communication through WP.  The following ship (which is intended to sit on the far side of a WP from the homeworld and act as a communications relay for pickets in the system) got a "Telegraph 002 cannot carry out its standard transit order as at least one ship is larger than the ship with the highest jump rating" error when I tried to have it do a standard transit after being dropped off at a WP.  I suspect that it's because of a bad interaction between the commercial drive and the lack of engines - I suspect the WP transit code thinks the design is military because it doesn't see commercial engines.

Code: [Select]

Telegraph class Sensor Outpost    700 tons     26 Crew     44 BP      TCS 14  TH 0  EM 0
1 km/s    JR 1-25(C)     Armour 1-7     Shields 0-0     Sensors 11/11/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
Maint Capacity 39 MSP    Max Repair 11 MSP

JC2K Commercial Jump Drive     Max Ship Size 2000 tons    Distance 25k km     Squadron Size 1

Thermal Sensor TH1-11 (1)     Sensitivity 11     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  11m km
EM Detection Sensor EM1-11 (1)     Sensitivity 11     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  11m km

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

John

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I'm playing around this game with small commercial bases (no engines) for picketing and communication through WP.  The following ship (which is intended to sit on the far side of a WP from the homeworld and act as a communications relay for pickets in the system) got a "Telegraph 002 cannot carry out its standard transit order as at least one ship is larger than the ship with the highest jump rating" error when I tried to have it do a standard transit after being dropped off at a WP.  I suspect that it's because of a bad interaction between the commercial drive and the lack of engines - I suspect the WP transit code thinks the design is military because it doesn't see commercial engines.

Code: [Select]

Telegraph class Sensor Outpost    700 tons     26 Crew     44 BP      TCS 14  TH 0  EM 0
1 km/s    JR 1-25(C)     Armour 1-7     Shields 0-0     Sensors 11/11/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
Maint Capacity 39 MSP    Max Repair 11 MSP

JC2K Commercial Jump Drive     Max Ship Size 2000 tons    Distance 25k km     Squadron Size 1

Thermal Sensor TH1-11 (1)     Sensitivity 11     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  11m km
EM Detection Sensor EM1-11 (1)     Sensitivity 11     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  11m km

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

John

Your guess is correct. I checked the ship design code and there is a flag in the ShipClass table for ships with at least one commercial engine. I could easily change this so that ships with no engines are set as commercial engined rather than military engined. I am just not sure if I should . I'll give it some thought.

Steve

[sloanjh]

Your guess is correct. I checked the ship design code and there is a flag in the ShipClass table for ships with at least one commercial engine. I could easily change this so that ships with no engines are set as commercial engined rather than military engined. I am just not sure if I should . I'll give it some thought.

Steve

I thought you might think that

EDIT: I'm a bit skeptical myself about parking "commercial" observation platforms at WP and leaving them there forever.  OTOH, my usual technique is to use OPs with single (military) engines, and that takes a LOT of micromanagement in terms of rotating them back home for refits.  On the whole, I think I prefer the game simplicity aspect over the "you're leaving us here for HOW long?" aspect.

John

[Brian Neumann]

I thought you might think that

EDIT: I'm a bit skeptical myself about parking "commercial" observation platforms at WP and leaving them there forever.  OTOH, my usual technique is to use OPs with single (military) engines, and that takes a LOT of micromanagement in terms of rotating them back home for refits.  On the whole, I think I prefer the game simplicity aspect over the "you're leaving us here for HOW long?" aspect.

John

You could also cover this with saying that the crew get rotated by the same mechanism that officers get to their commands without shipping them hither and yon.  It would make sense that there is a large pool of personell that are being moved around on a regular basis using civilian shipping as they change duty stations.

Brian

[sloanjh]

You could also cover this with saying that the crew get rotated by the same mechanism that officers get to their commands without shipping them hither and yon.  It would make sense that there is a large pool of personell that are being moved around on a regular basis using civilian shipping as they change duty stations.

Brian

Yep - that's the hand-waving I had in the back of my head.  That's the main reason I want to consider the Telegraph class to be capable of jump itself (rather than just opening a wormhole for communications purposes) - this class will sometimes be deployed just over the empire's border (on the other side of a border WP), so it should be able to transit back to the near side to meet up with such commercial shipping.

No matter what Steve decides to code up, I'll probably end up with a house rule that allows ships such as a Telegraph to jump themselves (for the reason above).

John

[sloanjh]

And there's still something funky going on with auto-assign.  I've repeatedly had the case where an officer thinks he's assigned to a ship, but the ship doesn't know he's assigned (and I'm pretty sure that he's not a passenger - he doesn't show up as "unassigned" in the skills filter unless I explicitly unassign him).

John

Have you noticed any pattern to this bug or does it seem to be random ships that are affected?

Steve

I found a pattern (in 5.4) - it looks like officers who are being transferred from staff to ship are the ones having a problem.  The ship doesn't know that the officer has been assigned command.  More details in the 5.4 thread.

John

[James Patten]

I suspect (but have not attempted to prove by calculating) that fuel usage in nebulas is unaffected by your actual forced speed.  In other words, I think that fuel consumption acts as though you're moving at (for example) 2000 kms instead of the imposed nebula speed 800 kms.

The reason I think so is that I have a system with a level 26 nebula.  I sent my FAC survey ship off at a slow rate, but figured I'd get there eventually.  In the month or so it took to move the ship the ship was running out of fuel.  The time frame was normal for my survey ships in clear space, but I figured I would be able to survey for the year or so it would take without too much problem.

[sloanjh]

I suspect (but have not attempted to prove by calculating) that fuel usage in nebulas is unaffected by your actual forced speed.  In other words, I think that fuel consumption acts as though you're moving at (for example) 2000 kms instead of the imposed nebula speed 800 kms.

The reason I think so is that I have a system with a level 26 nebula.  I sent my FAC survey ship off at a slow rate, but figured I'd get there eventually.  In the month or so it took to move the ship the ship was running out of fuel.  The time frame was normal for my survey ships in clear space, but I figured I would be able to survey for the year or so it would take without too much problem.

I think I remember someone else mentioning the same effect a year or two ago (Kurt maybe?).  Also, this reminds me of something I've been wondering about the last couple of days, but haven't done an experiment to check: does a ship moving at 1/2 speed consume fuel at 1/2 rate?  I'm sure this is the design intent, but it would be an easy thing to overlook both in the code and in games....

John

[ZimRathbone]

I suspect (but have not attempted to prove by calculating) that fuel usage in nebulas is unaffected by your actual forced speed.  In other words, I think that fuel consumption acts as though you're moving at (for example) 2000 kms instead of the imposed nebula speed 800 kms.

The reason I think so is that I have a system with a level 26 nebula.  I sent my FAC survey ship off at a slow rate, but figured I'd get there eventually.  In the month or so it took to move the ship the ship was running out of fuel.  The time frame was normal for my survey ships in clear space, but I figured I would be able to survey for the year or so it would take without too much problem.

I think that is actually correct - when in a nebula you will still be expending the same amount of energy, and driving your engines at full pelt - you're just getting less distance for it due to friction/whatever the technobable reason.  I have seen the same thing, which is why I frequently send along a couple of fuel harvesters to a nearby GG when surveying Nebulas