Ships getting misaligned

I've noticed - actually I think someone else mentioned something similar - that ships only get misaligned when atttempting to enter the square of an object they can't legally enter - be it a scout trying to enter the square of a solar system or another race's ship, or be it a warship attempting to enter an enemy solar system.

they get stuck for what looks like several reasons

At the moment this misaligning can be quite fun. I used it to misalign a few scouts and then sit them over (not in) star systems that I didn't want the enemy to capture. The enemy ships could not enter those systems! Bit of a cheat I know, but at a later stage in development it may be interesting to use the misalignment in conjunction with a tech advance? Phased ships?

It looks like all ships take the destination of a misaligned ship, when you have the misaligned ship selected with the "Find" function- and tries to select it with your mouse.

I've found that selecting every other ship, giving them a destination (like right next to the selected ship) and then selecting the ship again, clear that behaviour.

That may also be the reason I see nothing in the debug.err file - and makes me once again advocate for lines connecting a ship with it's destination.

I like the destination line idea

Could be useful for testing routing algorithms, too.

Actually I found a neat way to test those - and to speed the game up.

If you remember Brads post on Game Editing, then he explained that the Tech and Ship descriptions would be accessible as text files.

Well, I went there and set the move for Colony Ships and Scouts to 10. Makes for an entirely different game (good for very expansionistic or very fast games), but a bit too fast for my liking - anyway now you can test those algorithms..

On a related note: How will we be able to add new ships? As far as I can see, the ships are stored in a .mdl file.
Which format is this and how will we be able to create new ones?