This is primarily on the test server, happens 80% of the time, only seen it happen once or twice with CtC on Production

Anyways it makes it very hard to work on a mission if the bots vanish before I get there

If the sector is alive, like i was there within the last 5 min, this NEVER happens, only if it is sleeping

That's why missions should create mission-based bots when the player enters the sector.

Kinda hard to escort that way, I'll just ignore the crappy excuse and assume you are going to fix it and bump/remind on a frequent basis.

Ray is being factually accurate. This is not a bug, this is a very, very well-known limitation of a the original simplistic NPC architecture. It's the whole reason why we made the Kourier system to handle bot persistency (which manages the hive, skirmishes, deneb and so on). Kourier bots cannot be spawned from missions yet, although I've commented on this in the past that we do want to add it, but it's not a trivial undertaking.

You can make escort missions, where a particular NPC is being moved with the player and their death is specifically handled.

Anyway, I'll make a more involved response on the PCC forum.