DeVries (DV.MA) NPC Onil miner job

[donzi]

Hello,

TL;DR - is DeVries / RoC just supposed to have ice shortages despite having miners?

I have been revisiting XR (vanilla 4.30) and noticed a RoC Onil miner pacing between Lava Flow and Vapor Stream. It has no drones at all and visits each zone for maybe a minute before turning around.

I hacked in some drones to my save and it went free mining until its quota and sold the ice in Furnace Chamber then vanished.

Some time later I see a new Onil with an assortment of drones free mining. Some time later I notice it's got 0 drones and back to pacing.

I looked over a few source files (ships.xml, jobs.xml and mining.ship.free.xml) and kind of follow what they're doing.. but can't understand why the drones go missing and if this ship/job is a loop where it will respawn with drones, mine some if needed, and... if no ice to sell (drones removed?) and pace before the job ends?

My initial curiosity about this was seeing it pace back and forth w/o drones and thinking it was a left over plot ship or something since I'd imagine any NPC spawned miner will have drones (as the source xml seem to indicate).