I believe this is a multiplayer only issue due to the nature.

I'll simply explain what happened.

Friend out mining somewhere, sent mining carrier out to his location, carrier arrived at his location, said I'll order it to wireless remotely undock everything and he can tell it to help mine that sector, he told me the mining carrier was empty.

Got confused.

After looking between the route of travel. Found every mining drone in it's exactly in the position relative to each other if they were still docked, floating in space in a fixed stationary position.

Basically they came from the top 4 holes in rows of 4 from that carrier behind. There's be 32 altogether if I'd made the bottom set but I'd already been coming to the conclusion it was overkill and high maintenance and was going to look at fewer larger miners again in the future.

Ordering them to redock to carrier etc had an effect, but the direction they went in and the location they were after wasn't correct to the carriers actual position and they seemed to be fighting to break out of their formation at all, telling them to do things then asking them to idle rubber-banded them back into their original stiff docked formation, they'd draw themselves back into their formation like someone turned on a gravity well and could show ghosting properties with their hit boxes, basically signs that suggest a desync. Reconnecting to server did not help at all however.

It pretty much resembled the weird networking behaviour I've seen asteroids show before where it could flicker between positions and slide itself from between them trying to correct itself.

I couldn't easily reproduce in multiplayer with much smaller test ships, some limited success but it seemed able to correct itself.

I am not keen on attempting to try and reproduce with the ship that caused the problem to begin with as it took a long time with a friend helping to fix the mess. (16 glitched mining drones which after some poking and prodding were all spinning around everywhere and had to be entered and docked by hand, the Carrier itself had to have all it's logic reset because technically nothing ever undocked and it thought it was still full of drones so the rail system couldn't direct them to an empty space)

The problem seems to as far as I can tell, something do to with them unloading, probably from unloading in a certain way such as when crossing a sector border, I'm not sure.