Claim failed and Boarding Pod permanently adrift

[jmrc]

I ordered a 2-Star Piloting Marine to claim a ship, but for some reason it failed and the boarding pod stood there. I had to personally claim the ship but now the BPod is permanently adrift. Is there any way to recover the marine inside?
Also, the BPod is still in the property list, so I wonder if it will stay there until someone shoots him.

[Prophet1]

Can you com the marine? If so, have him work elsewhere for you and you assign him to whatever ship.

[jmrc]

Can you com the marine? If so, have him work elsewhere for you and you assign him to whatever ship.

No I can't Comm it. However, I can command it to Dock at my ship (which has crew space for him) but it doesn't move. I suppose this would be the most natural order for a BPod.
Interestingly, I can toggle arm/disarm turrets, give Squad orders and even order to collect deployables...
Another interesting "bug" is that I had a fighter docked at the frigate and from there I was able to access the "Transfer Wares" with the BPod, but didn't allow me to transfer the marine inside into my ship.

I gave up and just left it there.

[jlehtone]

What about the list of all personnel. Is the marine there and does it accept "Work elsewhere" that way?

[Duncaroos]

Maybe go out of sector? It may be stuck on something /colliding with an object you can't see

[Lord Dakier]

Almost 24 hours into a new vanilla save and I got the same pretty early on in The Reach. Boarding pod is still there lmao. Next time I visit the sector I'm just gonna blast it.

[dtpsprt]

Sorry to crash in your complaint party people but this is a known "issue" at least as back as V2.60 (when I started playing the game).

At that time, as I too was buffled by this behaviour, I was told (in Steam chat) that this happens once you are on board the claiming ship. The Marine never arrives...

The solution I was given then and still follow untill 40 mins ago was to leave the sector (teleport out) and then give the "claim" command. The pod leaves the ship, lands on the target and the ship is claimed.

I do believe that this is intentional by the devs because for a very short period in V3.00 BETA it was impossible to give a "claim" command unless you wwere actually flying the claiming ship yourself (totally useless if you go for the Drill in The Void)). This was fixed almost immediately and without any fuss. I didn't even had to submit a save if I remember correctly...

[RubyRezal]

I've tried the "leave the sector and come back" as I've seen people suggest, it has never worked for me. So I finally got irritated enough with this issue to try some technical troubleshooting on it.

I got into a situation where I had to make 4 claim attempts on an abandoned ship. The first 3 failed. I found I could reload this save and the behavior was consistent.

With debug logging enabled I found each failure logged the following error blocks the moment the pod launched.

Code: Select all

[General] 12611.88 ======================================
[=ERROR=] 12611.88 Entity Rena Arek [1442153] is not the 'Captain' control entity for ship Boarding Pod [1442154]. Can't initialise.
[General] 12611.88 ======================================
///
[General] 12649.29 ======================================
[General] 12649.29 ======================================
[=ERROR=] 12649.29 Entity Red Harben [1487264] is not the 'Captain' control entity for ship Boarding Pod [1487265]. Can't initialise.
[General] 12649.29 ======================================
///
[General] 12721.02 ======================================
[=ERROR=] 12721.02 Entity Thea Samdi [1569989] is not the 'Captain' control entity for ship Boarding Pod [1569990]. Can't initialise.
[General] 12721.02 ====================================== 

The pod that successfully boarded did not log this error. I can reload this save and the same marines consistently fail at boarding.

Interesting to note, all marines for the claiming ship were grayed out and "in transit" when I started claim attempts. I had not paid attention to this when I first encountered the problem or when I started testing. These marines are technically not available but the game allows boarding pods to be launched anyway with "in transit" crew members. The last marine arrived to their assigned ship before I launched the last pod which successfully boarded.

As a test I reloaded and waited until crew actually arrived at my ship before launching one of the pods that had consistently failed. Boarding was indeed successful.

It seems the validation to enable the claim option only checks whether marines are assigned to a ship but doesn't ensure they are actually on board. If you have no marines on board and launch "in transit" marines the boarding pod fails to initialize and the crew member assigned to the pod is lost forever.

So the answer seems to be make sure your marines are actually on board before launching boarding pods. Ideally the game shouldn't allow pods to be launched with "in transit" crew, but it does so that's something we all need to be aware of.
Another thing to be aware of; if you have your global orders set to automatically claim abandoned ships any ship in your empire will automatically launch "in transit" marines at abandoned ships if they are the only marines assigned to a ship. This is probably not as obvious in a vanilla game but can be an issue if you play modded with Enhanced Bailing and encounter a lot of abandoned ships.

[Alan Phipps]

@ RubyRezal: Thanks, ardias reported something similar here a few years ago. Now the OP needs to try to confirm if their marine was present on their boarding ship at the time of the claim command, or still in transit.

[RubyRezal]

I want to follow up on this, I just witnessed one of my ships automatically launching an in-transit marine at an abandoned ship even though there were two on board marines. I can't tell what the logic is behind which marine the game selects when launching a boarding pod, but it obviously does not prioritize marines that are actually on board.

There is a risk of this issue occurring if there are *any* in-transit marines when a boarding pod is launched.

[Alan Phipps]

Right, thanks again. That would definitely merit a report in the Tech Sp forum with a link to an uploaded vanilla save where it is happening, or even better where it is reliably about to happen. The steps to take on first loading the save so as to see it happen would be very useful. Then I'm sure the devs could address it and prevent it from happening.

[jmrc]

Ah, that's a very interesting find. Yes, he was most probably still in transit because I had just ordered it to be transfered from another ship outside the sector.
Unfortunately I don't have the situation saved anymore to confirm it.

The current status is the BPod still there with the indication that it has a Captain but he doesn't show up in the crew list of the BPod and neither in the general list.

[RubyRezal]

I've produced a vanilla save and submitted it with steps to reliably reproduce the problem in the Tech Support forum.
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