This is common at armor dealers, since they only have 4 (Edit: 5?) ports. Often, only one is free and it's reserved for the player or Korolov freighters they're escorting. This causes AI traffic to get stuck trying to dock with the station, which is silly and can prevent Korolov missions from being available.

Commonwealth trading posts in Eternity Port often fill all their docking ports, not leaving one for the player. I've seen this happen (very rarely) at other stations, too.

Some or all of these suggestions might help:
- Give armor dealers more docking ports.
- Reduce the amount of time wandering AI ships spend docked at stations.
- Make guards that are permanently assigned to a station patrol it rather than staying docked, either all the time or when the number of free docking ports gets too low.

nms 10 Oct 2015:

relanat suggests this may be due to having an incorrect dockingPorts parameter.
See https://forums.kronosaur.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=7382

relanat 13 Oct 2015:

Possibly it is related to reinforcement minShips= as well. Armor stations have minShips=4 which would fill all but the docking port left free for the player. I don't know how minShips works though, so this is a guess.

relanat 22 Dec 2015:

Had another look at this. I think the value of reinforcement minShips needs to be at least 2 less than the number of available docking ports. This leaves one port open full time for the player and one more for freighters to dock to stop the buildup.

The armor stations start out with a mix of ships with orders to 'gate on attack' or 'guard'.

Over time as the station gets attacked the ships with 'gate on attack' orders flee the system and are replaced by ships with 'guard' orders. Because the number of ships at armor stations with guard orders can be up to 4 these fill all the available slots (excluding the one left open for the player). This means non-'guard' ships don't have anywhere to dock unless the station is attacked and the guards undock and fight the enemy.

When this happens the non-guard freighters dock while the guards are fighting and after the appropriate time delay gate out again. The guards will then fill up all the ports again so it all keeps happening.

Having at least one port (excluding the dock left open for the player) available by reducing minShip guards to 3 might be enough to clear the backlog of ships.

digdug 24 Dec 2015:

highly possible that is like relanat says: some stations have dockingports number different from <DockingPorts> and that may cause the problem.

nms 18 Sep 2017:

I reduced the number of ships at armor dealers in 1.8A3. I think other stations where I've seen this are already fixed.