Annoying Bughunt Slows Lepanto's Workflow, Causes Moderate InconvenienceIn pale mockery of Battuta-sama's bughunt reports, I thought I'd share with you my own tale of woe caused by bizarre bugs (with a requisite side of extra DRAMA).
Currently, I'm working on Lopez's mission. It shall be an epic battle between the ill-fated commander of the Carthage and the ravenous Shivan hordes, with BEAMZ and bombs flying, and tens of thousands of lives on the line. FREDding has been rather long and complex, and I still have much work to do before this harrowing gauntlet is even beta-ready, much less release-worthy.
Anyhow, I was beta-testing a section where you have to fight a Ravana. I noticed that the Ravana's forward LReds were carving up the Carthage, even though I had told two of my bomber wings to defang the Shivan destroyer's fragile forward beam mounts. When fiddling with Alpha and Beta wings' weapon loadouts didn't help my bombers to complete their assigned task, I used the screencam script to take a closer look at the situation.
Lo and behold, the bombers
were not firing at all. 
These bomber pilots of the warlike GTVA had, no doubt by some mysterious design of the Vishnans, embraced the pacific joy of Ubuntu with a fervor which even the Council of Elders would envy. They had resolved to appreciate the beauty and fragility of all life, even in the Shivan tide seeking to snuff out their lives and those of their comrades. They merely hovered in front of the enemy warship's beam mounts, all their weapons silent as their flagship was reduced to debris by their inaction.
Of course, their embrace of enlightened pacifism was simply unacceptable, as it ruined my carefully-built playground of war.
I had to restore my pilots' burning fires of bloodlust, so that they might destroy the Shivans' weapons and ships, and restore balance to
the Force my poor mission. The magic of friendship and harmony had no place before the exigencies of pitiless gameplay expediency.
But how? After some bughunting, I narrowed down the problem to a quite unusual cause; apparently, my bomber wings' arrival orders. For reasons I still cannot fathom, the very act of launching from a capship (ANY capship, apparently) turned my bomber pilots into committed pacifists who would not fire a single weapon on the enemy.
Only by abandoning my plan of launching Alpha and Beta wings from an Orion's deck mid-mission, and just setting their arrival cues to True, was I able to turn them back into the merciless killers which they were born to be.
So, anyway, I didn't really solve the problem; I just worked around it. Does anybody have the slightest clue what quirk of FRED/AI/whatever could have made my bombers refuse to fire their weapons whenever they launched from a capship?
