During the past week, on about every 4th or 5th convoy mission I take, the target ship will never leave the station. It just sits entangled in the station infrastructure, usually in one of the ship "clusters". I have waited over 30 minutes but the mission never starts moving, ultimately I just abort it. Similarly, I have missions where the convoy reaches the target location but one ship never enters the station, so the mission never ends. I would appreciate any feedback anyone can provide.

I notice this as well. Except I usually take convoy missions for the purpose of killing them, so if they get stuck and have something valuable enough to be worth it, I just kill them right there, NFZ be damned.

They really need to have their pathing and flight code improved. Or if nothing else, set them to fly further away from the station before turning to approach their waypoint, and check whether the path would pass through the station's bounding box (not just the raw collision mesh) when deciding whether to go around it. That would keep them away from the geometry, which the AI finds understandably confusing.

I had an entire convoy get stuck on an asteroid (along side many other NPCs) in Ukari L-2. Maybe some gravity well or NPC brain wave emitter was compelling them to try and dock with the asteroid...?

Sure is fun to blow them up with conc mines though. :)

One simple functional workaround:

Approach it slowly dead ahead, almost bump on it. They will retreat to avoid you, and being unable to take the same route, will plot another course, becoming free again.

Works on Roids, Stations, etc., and does not trigger NFZ rule.

@Alloh So by plot another course do you mean plot a random course? If so, it could take a while (potentially, but increasingly more unlikely, forever) for the voy to get free.

Alloh, I have done that at one entangled at a station and it never would break free. I have not tried it on one stuck on an asteroid. Its a frustrating bug to do a convoy mission only to find out at the end it can't be completed.

I escorted a 4 ship convoy this morning. One sector before the end point all 4 ships collected on an asteroid and were stuck. No amount of bumping or pushing had any affect, so I finally aborted. I would think after 10 years there wouldn't be a major bug in a basic convoy mission, oh well....

It _is_ lame, SR, although it's a flaw in all bots' pathfinding behavior, rather than a convoy mission bug. Fixes have been attempted before, but it's hard to reproduce quickly or reliably. I plan to take some steps toward a fix tonight, if I can finish a more pressing task with time to spare.