[Scotty]

I'm getting a weird error message that I don't have any idea how to keep from coming up.  All it says is "Special ship out of range for "Alpha.""  What does that even mean?

[General Battuta]

That's a new one on me.

[The E]

Are you setting up a wing for autopilot, perhaps?

Note for the future, ALWAYS give us details on what it is you're doing. Don't force us coders into having to boot up our dev environments just to search the codebase for that error message.

[Scotty]

Sorry about that.

You are correct in that I'm trying to set up an autopilot.  The player, Alpha 4, receives a message list, and when that finishes, gets a directive to engage autopilot (if they feel like it).  I have events laid out so that when autopilot is engaged (or, rather, key-pressed Alt-A, with directive text to match), the player switches to AI, which is following waypoints at the time.

Basically:
Engage Autopilot ((event name))
---> when
     ---> key-pressed
           ---> Alt-A
     ---> player-use-ai

then, chained to that event:

Player Follow Waypoints
---> when
     ---> true
     ---> add-goal
            ---> Alpha 4
         ---> ai-waypoits
              ---> Alpha Patrol Path
              ---> 89

Which leads into a screen fade-out, and fade-back in after the waypoints are done, with a final event for player-not-use-ai.

[The E]

Okay. How far are the other members of Alpha wing from Alpha 1 (or whoever is designated wing leader, aka the "special ship")?

[General Battuta]

It strikes me that the problem here is that you're using Alt-A and confusing the FRED-scripted autopilot you've jury-rigged together with the 'real' FSO autopilot. Or am I mistaken?

[Scotty]

Problem fixed.  Thank you Axem.

[Scotty]

While this is still semi-recent, does anyone know what I did to trigger the error?

[Dilmah G]

I think Battuta might've been onto something.

[Axem]

Battuta wasn't. The problem was from FRED losing track of ships related to Alpha wing. It lost the Special Ship (The wing leader) and lost the Docking Bay Arrival/Departure anchors. How? I'm not sure. FRED works in mysterious ways...