[Asteroth]

What do they do? The few places I can find on the wiki that really talk about them are very vague and don't give much information on how exactly to set them up. What are they, what do they do, where do I put them, and why do I put them there?

[Spoon]

auto generate in pcs2 works most of the time, though you might want to manually adjust them after that.
paths are used for fighter bays, docking points and subsystems. They tell which way the a.i. should take to dock, attack a subsystem or move out of a fighter bay

[Nyctaeus]

Remember, you must do paths for hangarbays manually. PCS2 generator won't do it correctly.

[zookeeper]

However, it's worth noting that docking paths and fighterbay paths can be very fickle and the AI just doesn't necessarily obey them as you'd expect. As far as I can tell, there's bugs involved and black magic required.

[headdie]

Remember, you must do paths for hangarbays manually. PCS2 generator won't do it correctly.

Good point I just raised this request in The FreeSpace Tools Project

[Asteroth]

Ah ok, I didn't know there was an auto-generate. Their presence makes more sense for fighterbays, I just wasn't sure why they were need for things like subsystems, and since they are, what they would do.