Jump Away System

OK, it's been done before so no surprises but I have come up with a snag and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions.

I want a "Jump Away" system to protect undocked ships so if the shields drop below 66% it will fire a jump drive that has already been fully charged and jump the ship to a "safe" location. So far so good.

My idea was to set the Bobby AI to "Ship" and activate it and then activate the Jump Away circuit when I'm leaving the ship unattended. This would allow the ship to defend itself even if I was offline. If it got attacked and was in danger of being overwhelmed, it would jump away to save itself.

Problem...if I come back online and find I've been raided, how the f**k am I going to find my ship again? I had thought of having some kind of docked entity in a fleet to act as a "locator" and hope that this jumped with the ship! Not knowing what direction it was facing if it jumps means that I may have "lost" the ship anyway.

Any suggestions as to how I might "find" the ship again? Thanks!

Crusade said:

Logoffs are tied to ships now. When you log off while aligned to a ship, if it moves while you're offline, you should spawn back on it.

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Yeah, I had considered that and that is fine if I log off while aboard that ship but what if I'm not?

Consider this...Ship A is left in orbit above my HB. It is not in a fleet, just has the AI active. This will obviously mean that it can bring to bear any pilot operated weapons against an enemy ship as well as any active turrets. At the moment, fleet ships revert to idle if you are offline. So only active turrets would be used.

Obviously a fleet ship can just be brought back easily but if it is simply AI controlled? If I am mining elsewhere in Ship B and Ship A comes under attack and sustains sufficient damage to jump away how do I find Ship A and recover it?

Crusade said:

If it's the primary ship in a fleet, it'll show up on the galaxy map as a lil green icon. Perhaps set it to it's own fleet simply to track location?

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But if it is in a fleet it cannot be set to "Ship" in the AI so it is just a stationary platform for turrets when offline.

My original idea was to have a docked entity on the ship that was the "flagship" of a fleet called " Ship A" for example. I'm not in game so I cannot tell but would this report its' location correctly or even jump with "Ship A"? Other than that it is a manual search for the ship x sectors away in every direction!

If the ship only had minimal weapons onboard it wouldn't really matter but if the primary weapons array(s) were on the main ship and it only had some AMS, it would be a sitting duck!

If it has been fixed in the update along with the possibility of fleets having "sticky" orders when going offline the whole problem will be academic.

Unfortunately my laptop is down so I cannot try anything myself but thanks for everyones comments and suggestions.