[2.21] Ship stuck executing undock order. - Fixed 2.60

[Imperial Good]

This behaviour was observed by using the current stable branch at time of posting running an unmodified game with ventures enabled.

I have encountered a ship which is stuck performing the undock order. Nothing seems to allow it to proceed with undocking. Removing its assignment changed nothing. Removing all orders from it removed all except the undocking order. Since it is undocking one cannot manually take control of it since the pilot will refuse to step aside. It is also impossible to fire or replace the pilot during undocking. Both in sector and out of sector makes no difference, it retains the order and does not move. I even tried physically pushing the ship with another ship and it still retains the order and does not move. I left it in this state for several hours and it still is stuck undocking in the exact same place. Save/load cycling makes no difference, still is stuck with the order.

The save file containing the ship...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/b0xh57fancwzb ... ave.xml.gz
This save file may be reuses for other bug reports unrelated to this specific issue.

The ship in question is named "A Stuck Raider" without any wing assignments to distinguish it from other ships. It is located in Pious Mists II near the player controlled Shipyard in that sector.

I am not entirely sure how it ended up in this state. The ship was part of a group of 10 Minotaur Raiders ("L Hunters" wing) which are used to supply marines for boarding SCA Behemoth Vanguards that are stripped of turrets by a player controlled missile corvette while in sector ("A Fire Dragon"). The total marine capacity of the wing is 100 marines, with each boarding operation using the maximum 44 marines for best results. After 2 boarding operations they are ordered to refit on more marines, and possibly counter measures, at the player owned Shipyard in Pious Mists II. After all refits are ordered, the wing leader is told to follow the next potential victim ship. However it has been observed multiple times that one of the ships, usually the one directly below the wing leader in the property list, will get stuck performing their refit order and hang around the shipyard forever until the order is manually cleared and refit is reissued. Not always noticing this I sometimes order the wing to board the victim ship while one of the wing members is still scheduled to refit or is undocking from refitting. Since this does not work very well (usually some will fail to launch boarding pods), I remove such individuals from the boarding operation to allow hull cutting to continue with a reduced marine count and the ship is captured successfully.

Usually any order confusion eventually fixes itself and all ships reunite in time for the next boarding operation, but during the second to last mission I ran it did not for that ship. It has been stuck there ever since performing the undock order with no apparent way to fix it. Of course one can always destroy it and order/capture a replacement, but that is at best a work around and not really a solution.

[Newbie13]

I have the same issue here. One of the fighters is just hovering over my ship maintenance station. The fighter was assigned to a frigate (=wing). When I've ordered the frigate to dock for some repair, the fighter also tryed to dock the station, but there were no free docks. When the frigate finished its repairs, left the station, the fighter changed its current command to "Undock", and stucked. It is there for hours. I had have to push it away by an other ship to free up the path to the docks as other ships bumped into it occasionally. And yeah, no off-sector, save-reload could help. The last idea I had to shoot it out from the sky simply...

[Imperial Good]

Maybe the simplest solution for this would be a fail safe that if undocking takes too long (eg hours) then eventually it should time expire. In any case it seems related to wings since like Newbie13 that ship in my save was part of wing and the wing leader was also ordered to refit at the same time so would have been docking/undocking with the station at a similar time.

[Newbie13]

Maybe the simplest solution for this would be a fail safe that if undocking takes too long (eg hours) then eventually it should time expire.

Hm. Maybe this is exactly what happens/d. The fighter has vanished from my sky after a couple of (in-game) hours. But it seems I'm not so lucky with other 'stuck materials'. My little Gorgon tryed to deploy (according my command) 15 laser towers. One of them is literally stuck between the 2 yaws of the docking bay when in that exact moment it was about to leave the bay. Half of the laser tower lies outside of the ship, the other half is still inside. (No other harm can be seen ) Now the other 15 laser towers queued for deployment are also stuck inside the docking bay, listed as 'docked ships'. Also the poor defense drones are unable to fly out. No way in, no way out I wonder what will happen during the next battle of that poor Gorgon.

[Schrotti]

I encountered this error a few times now, waited for hours but the ships still were stuck in undocking. Even reloading didn't help.

There is a workaround for M- and L-size ships with landing pad though. Have a small ship dock at the ship stuck in undocking and transfer the captain to the docked ship. This worked for me and this way I didn't lose my experienced captains. Sometimes the transfer was very slow though and the captain didn't reach the newly assigned ship, usually the captain can be found then on the landing pad doing nothing so you might have to repeat the transfer order. But as I said this works only if your stuck ship got a landing pad.

I'm not sure if this error happens in vanilla, but it definitely happens if you use the cheat menu from Slan and jump to a different location before undocking has completely finished. Patience is the key here...

[grbaker]

Yep.. ditto, got one of my own Behemouth's stuck undocking from a Teladi Shipyard.

I wondered where the hell it got to after I sent it off for repairs... many saves later I found it just sitting there, not quite parked at the Shipyard but unwilling to finish its undocking action.

Fired the pilot, promoted a Service crew to pilot, no change. Rammed the ship with another ship... it didn't budge.

Was thinking of starting fresh anyway when the SPLIT arrive......

[Alan Phipps]

The more and varied vanilla saves with repro steps demonstrating the issue that are linked here, the sooner all the various causes of the problem can be solved by the devs. Bare bones 'me too' posts seldom add much value to the investigation.

[Newbie13]

FYI there are two (partial) workarounds for this.

Solution 1 - if the following conditions met:
- ship executing 'undock' order
- ship is still in the dock/on station
- you have teleportation

The workaround to get out of this (worked for me):

1. teleport to the undocking ship
2. talk to the captain
3. select 'Work for me elsewhere' ('Fire' won't work)
4. select the station the ship is docked as a new workplace for him
5. click 'Assign'

...then the captain (if he is thoroughbred - mine was) will get up, and move to his new assignment which will also abort the 'undock' order.

Note again: workaround works only if ship executing 'undock' order, and it is still on the station!
(I guess the story is how to fix a bug by exploiting another bug.)

Solution 2 - if the following conditions met:
- ship executing 'undock' order
- ship already left the dock/station, hovering (stuck) above it

The workaround to get out of this (worked for me):

1. sell the ship using the map
2. open map ('m' key)
3. select the ship
4. right click on a wharf/shipyard
5. select the sell ship menu command

...'undock' order deleted, and the ship flew away (guess got some commands from the new lord) - but you've also lost your ship, of course - mine was a little fighter, so I didn't bother too much about it.

(Actually, if a captain can not undock, it is better to get rid of him, isn't? )

Cheers.

[Imperial Good]

This appears fixed in 2.60 B2 or fixed itself after a lot of time. The captain of the above mentioned stuck ship vanished. A new captain could be promoted from the crew and the formally stuck ship can be controlled and ordered around as normal.

As such I consider this issue now solved.