Watchtower interfered with a lifted-off ground capture and dead-ended

[erlkonig]

So, right after finding a 7-resource spot on Linnaeus IV-b, I noticed an Ecliptic ship and started a grueling, horrible ground capture (I'm level 19 on Extreme, NG+1). Their ship takes off with me in it.
A pair of Watchtower ships attempt to stun it in orbit, with one Ecliptic complaining about his head (not clear if this was caused by the syntaptic disrupter), we get hit twice, I'm still mobile (annoyingly so are the Ecliptic and the turret in their ship, which amusingly seems to have been shooting them the whole time).

Eventually I capture the Ecliptic ship. In the meantime, Watchtower appears to have yanked my Home Ship up from where I left it in my Outpost into orbit, docked with it, and boarded it in my absence, totally ignoring me, in the ship I captured.

I manage to kill the higher-level ship of the pair of Watchtower ships, level 25? perhaps, and then try to kill the level 6 W' ship still docked to mine. Impossible. I can easily blow off the shields, but can't damage any systems or primary ship health. I'm also trapped in my captured ship by being unable to Fast Travel at all.

I eventually used Void Form, then movetoqt to jump into my docked-with-Watchtower home ship, killed one of them, and then instantly got captured normally. More testing followed.

Overall impressions:

• I shouldn't have to use console commands to get that odd situation unstuck
• Watchtower probably shouldn't be interfering with ground-to-space ship captures, since the results are pretty broken
• Why the flip was my home ship in orbit instead of where I left it?

Now, after doing the movetoqt, which then puts me in basically the same situation as a normal Watchtower boarding into the ship I'm on:

• It bugs me that the moment I kill one of the intruders, I'm captured - especially since it means they're using the synaptic disruptor on themselves (presumably the crew on the ship blasting the target ship, boarders and all)
• While Watchtower is running around my Home ship, why can't I go invade theirs through the docker connection? That would be a good time
• Testing with kill to kill all the boarding Watchtower at once is still followed by getting captured
• How did the Watchtower ship docked to me even use their Disruptor? Was the other, high-level ship supposed to do it? Because I'd already blown that one up.

And generally, speaking from my perspective on my main character at level 218 or so that's finished Watchtower's main questline:

• It doesn't make sense that I'm never able to actually use a Synaptic Disruptor, even though it's clear that I can now capture Watchtower ships that must have had it, and fly them (I'm assuming it's a ship mounted weapon, because I'm going to be upset if Watchtower peons are actually carrying them around, all vulnerable to being taken - even if it means knocking out and taking the owner along - and reverse-engineered)
• If the idea is that we're never supposed to be able to use it because, say, the Disruptor ships always self-destruct, then when we board one, we should here that the self-destruct is counting down (a long enough count to allow for ship battle and looting), and have to get out before it goes boom - and the pilot's chair should be entirely disabled/unresponsive
• If we can't use a Disruptor (and it's a ship mount and we captured it) there should at least be some lore from Gren or something explaining it's not possible.
• If I do manage to kill any of the boarders, their bodies vanish, neither sitting on my ship to loot, nor being found on the ship docked to mine, which impacts immersion.

 

[twolargepepperoni]

Thanks for reporting this - I've opened an investigation into the intro starting while the player is capturing another ship. Definitely not intentional!

 

[erlkonig]

Thanks for the reply! I'd written another not long before, "A list of bugs and issues", but I don't know if that was in a usable form from the developers' perspectives. Is it? Or is there a streamlined one-post-per-issue forum I didn't see?