Drydock Bugs

[engineer]

I've created a class of AR's intended to simulate mobile drydocks (see the attached JPG). In debugging it, I have a problem. After loading the modded scenario, the drydock shows up as a legitimate class of ships in the supporting screens, but the drydock ships don't show up in the reinforcement queue. I also modified a few to show up initially at West Coast ports and they didn't show up either. The format for the ships is the same that I've used for any number of other ships (like when I added the reserve destroyers to the reinforcement queue (see the nearby US Reserve Destroyers thread) and those work.

Is it possible that there is some sort of "register" for particular ship classes and if the number of ships exceeds the limit then things crash?



PS: Looking over in the classes you can see some other non-stock items.
Flores: This a Dutch gunboat. Flores and Soemba are added to the RNN (per Jane's Fighting Ships).
AP's: AP's enter the game as passenger liners or troopships. The liners may upgrade to troopships. Troopships may upgrade to armed merchant cruiser. Each type of AP upgrades to a different type of armed merchant cruiser with the appropriate speed, endurance, and armament. AMC's may upgrade back to troopships. I'm still playing around with that. I'm worried the AI may trap ships into an perment upgrade loop from troopship to AMC and back again.

[engineer]

I played with this last night and got this work. 

1)  I could put the drydocks in a port at the start of the scenario and it would appear. 
2)  I added a non-zero speed to the dry docks (a fiction to cover the use of tugs or other vessels for tow) and they all showed up with no problems

So it appears that non-zero speeds are a requirement for a ship to proceed from off-map to base for reinforcements.  The updated drydock that loads into the scenario files normally is given below:

[pad152]

Note: Even with a speed of zero the, the dry dock will still be able to move, same as a ship with zero fuel.

Warning the AI will still treat it as a ship, the CHS mod for Witp has a dry dock in Manila, and when AI plays allies, it will create a taskforce of ships with the dry dock with a speed of 5 knots, when the Philipines is invaded, making it an easy target.

[engineer]

Yes, a zero speed ship or dry dock can move. The hitch seems to be that the engine won't allow a zero speed ship to enter the game as a reinforcement although it will accept a zero speed ship in the initial OOB.  Since these dry docks are all wartime construction I have to finesse that.  Fortunately, all the dry docks enter the game on the US west coast so they are out of harm's way.