Not sure what's going on with station subordinates

[Vertigo 7]

I've just built 10 Nodan Vanguards and I assigned them to station defence, no hierarchy. The station itself has 1 aux ship, 4 destroyers, 12 L miners/gas haulers, 9 medium fighters, 5 medium miners, 1 medium transport, and 11 S fighters, including the Nodans. When I assigned the Nodans to the station, they haul ass out of the sector to escort the transport. I've never seen that before. Is that something stations are supposed to do with their subordinates? They're showing the commander is still the station but their orders are to escort the transport.

[radcapricorn]

Yup, that's what the manager does. I wish there were more settings to allow/prohibit this, or set ship groups for i.e. defending station itself and the ships. With current "dumb" behavior of escorts that can never actually escort anything due to very latent pathing, it's just sad.

[SPiDER]

you have two other options to get them to do as you want them to.

1 Assign them to the destroyer ( but you need to keep an eye on them as sometimes they can bug out and do weird defend position or chase ships in other sectors ....fix inbound for this )

2 Assign them to protect position and click on the station when assinging them the position ( but you also need to keep an eye out for them because they also will bug out and chase xenon acroos the galaxy and them commit suicide at a Xenon Wharf....fix inbound for this too )

[Vertigo 7]

That's what I ended up doing, I've just never seen the station assigning escorts before. This is like my 10th station I've built. Just a strange coincidence, I suppose.

[radcapricorn]

AFAIK, it also depends on the order you assign people in. I.e. if you assign defenders first, and then the manager, that manager won't be "using" those defenders. But same goes for other ships too (i.e. miners, traders). I don't know if that's temporary, I always just explicitly reassign any ship that I may have assigned before hiring a manager.

[Imperial Good]

Station managers use defence subordinates to either patrol the station sector or escort station trader and mining subordinates.

If you want explicitly to defend the station then organize the ships into a wing (fleet) and set a defence orientated default order to the wing leader. Good defence orders are patrol (general sector security), defend point (blockading access routes) and protect station (huddling near station).

The wing approach is also the most practical as once an area is made secure the wing can be effortlessly redeployed somewhere else where it is needed.

Stations are also pretty resilient themselves. Especially if all production and storage modules have maximum weapon loadout with something like Pulse Laser. The odd S or M ship poking them should do very little damage, and mostly be distracted trying to shoot out the turrets OoS for the few moments before it dies. They also self repair when out of combat, at a rate determined by the number of repair drones. The only time one really needs to defend stations is if they are at risk of fleet attack, especially fleets containing L or XL destroyers.