That's correct, but it's more complicated than it sounds. Facing the right direction isn't particularly easy if it's not facing directly at some object or along one of the three axes.
Shouldn't the previously-mentioned used of waypoints do the trick? For arrival grid placement, place all ships in close proximity, then place a waypoint at extreme distance in the direction you want them to point, use the point-towards option in object editor, then remove the waypoint. For departures, have the cap-ship turn towards a waypoint again at extreme distance, have fighters approach then cap-ship then turn in the same direction. Use a variable or argument event to confirm when all fighters are in formation, but discount any that might have been destroyed, then initiate warp for all.
While we're on the subject, I've always thought that it would be useful to define an object's orientation via hand-keyed figures the way you can input co-ordinates, rather than trying to adjust them freehand or via the waypoint-point-to method.
The other problem is that ships have different warpout speeds. In order to get the ships to all disappear at the same spot, you'd have to place them at carefully calculated points forwards or backwards along the main ship.
I believe that there are table options to control warping accel/decel rates and warping speeds. You'd only need to make sure that these figures are the same for all ships.
I would say the Warp Group option is the way to go.
I could probably see such a system being somewhat more user-friendly, but I suspect that it would require so much new code as to take quite a long time to implement. My suggestion on the other hand would be completely backwards compatible with existing missions, but one could make the table adjustments for warping speeds etc as a mod of the main TBP and include adjusted ship placements for any missions that are updated to this new system. Also, as I said earlier, I suspect that finding a way to simply disable the vortex rendering while preserving speed+accel./decel. is much less difficult to implement.
There are other issues too. What happens if the ships get a warp out order but the ship which is controlling the formation of the warp hole is dead or disabled? It would not be a simple change at all.
I would suspect that the answer is quite obvious... design your missions so that either A), your target cap-ship can't be disabled with ship-subsyst-guardian-threshold, B), you get auto-fail (or die) if you lose your cap-ship, or C), include contingencies for alternate departure methods available to the player (other cap-ships or jumpgates), should your prime ship be destroyed. It all comes down to how you handle your mission. In fact, the mission would need to be designed for contingencies like this anyway for story purposes, I'm just trying to simulate the visual aspects of B5 warping in regards to group warping and their speeds.
Now, I know that I'm not an active member of TBP anymore, and I don't know if anyone on the current Zathrus team would directly want or use this, I'm just saying that it could be made to work, and that I suspect it's the least troublesome to implement. But if it is done, then the existing team may decide to make use of it.
Thank you.
