Kinda makes escort missions extremely annoying though, as one hyperspace storm can just instantly fail the mission for you as even the small distance makes it near impossible to catch up to them before they're inevitably caught by an inconveniently spawned convoy raider fleet, to no fault of trlhe player.
Impossible to catch up? Your fleet should be faster than the trade fleet though? As long as you command your fleet to follow the trade fleet, the AI will know where it is no matter how far away, and you have 7 days to regain contact. I'm not sure what I'm missing but I never have any problem remaining not too far away from the fleet.
the problem is, though, that you have to click off of the trade fleet to maintain distance, so that it doesn't veer off-course trying to run away from you. depending on the sensor strength of your fleet, how much the game is sped up, and your own reflexes, you might not be able to react in time to pause and click on the fleet before it gets out of range.
and that 7 day limit gets a whole lot shorter when you have to catch up with the fleet before a convoy raider destroys them. a small trade fleet doesn't have the ships to spend a lot of time in combat in the first place, and a raider can be up to 3x stronger than it.
furthermore, if the trade fleet's running afoul of hyperstorms, then odds are, you're not in the core worlds, and the trade fleet's not just going to bounce off of
one storm. no way you're gonna be able to find where the fleet went then, except through pure luck. god knows how many times i've tracked a fleet, only for it to dive into a storm and completely vanish.
