Well I can answer half the question... I forget the other half
The
special ship is used for wings, is set by default to the wing leader (i.e. Alpha 1, Beta 1, etc.), and is used by the FS2 engine as the "anchor" point for the wing.
At one time I had figured out the specific error you are getting, but that was 2 years ago and I don't remember exactly what it was. There are several threads on the
Fred2 forums about it, but it seems since they were taken over by that
other company, the threads were made unavailable. You can do a search and find the threads, but when you go to access them you get a "thread does not exist" error
(there is a TON of good info that is lost as a result... grrrrrrr).
* EE fades back into the ether *