The slave transport originally spawned about 7000 ls from the fortress...
It is a dual star system however, but still
I was quite a while underway when I thought of making a screenshot.
This is HuariMission01.xml. Looks like if there's an active Sung station that's at least 300 ls from a stargate and farther from the gate than the mission giver is, the transport will start there. This is probably fine, but usually there isn't one.
Otherwise, it picks a random gate and starts the transport at a random position not near any active non-Sung stations that's 1.1 to 1.5 times as far away from the gate as the mission giver is. Obviously, that can be quite far when the mission giver and the gate are on opposite sides of a binary system. It does have to be far enough that the player can intercept, but not that far, considering the player is several times as fast as the the transport.
Some possible improvements:
- We could always pick the closest gate, or pick the closest one that's at least a certain distance from the mission giver.
- We could calculate the travel time for the player from the mission giver to the target gate, add a fixed amount of time (e.g. 30 seconds), and then multiply the result by the transport's speed (6% c = 3.6 ls per real second) and use that as the initial distance for the transport.
Fixed in 1.9 beta 4. Thanks!