I have noticed a few times, that convoy ships caught in an ion storm will not initiate jump when they enter the spherical area of exit point, but only after they fly past the center point.

For some reason, the convoy bots often have entirely different exit points than players do.

No, this was different - three times in a row the convoy ships initiated their jumps exactly at the location of storm exit waypoint displayed on my HUD. I was flying close to them, so I know.

I can confirm this behavior -- back when the NPCs did fairly reliably use the same jump points as players, they still wait until they're at the center of the jump point. This is clear even in non-ion storm sectors, where convoys will often fly through a 3000m zone to get to a jump point.

This may not be an entirely bad thing. Bots have no loading time when jumping between sectors, so having things like this helps balance out that advantage.

What I do see as a problem are times when the bots enter an Ion storm, then leave it by an exit point completely different from the one you have. During escort missions, this can be anything from a minor annoyance to a mission-failer, depending on how far apart the NPC and player storm exits are. Getting them through a swarm of assualts, then losing them to another swarm of assualts in the next storm sector because you were busy heading for the player's ion storm exit (15k off in extreme circumstances) in the current sector, is patently unfair. There are two solutions to this problem- force the NPCs to use the same exit points as players, or open up the NPC exit points to player use.

just wanted to bring this to attention again. I did an escort mission today that went through an ion storm. One of the ships got attacked, so I had to rush in to help and after they jumped, I had to fly back 12k meters to exit the storm. So... bump...

Yeah I'd like to see this fixed too, I like the feeling of escorting a voy through an ion storm, picking off the attacking hive bots (when/if they show up). But when the voys jump point is in the complete opposite direction from yours it's a definite moodkiller.

especially since all escort missions are based around protecting the voy, and the main threat is always storms.

Another vote to fix the convey exit point in ion storms please.