So, a while ago I had made a post on Steam about crashing while doing an assassination mission, four times in a row I may add, but couldn't get a definitive answer on what exactly was happening. So, I took it upon myself to test what was causing the CTD. I was interested as this sprung up again while I was in the Colonia system doing missions for rep to unlock another engineer.
Upon entering instance, engage mission target and his four cronies, kill his cronies and do a few loop-de-loops and my shields get low as do his, but mine regenerate faster due to engineering and bi-weaves, so I boost away. Boost away and regen to 100, turn around, get his shields down and start to lower his hull and boost away to regen shields. Suddenly, CTD with no warning. This is now the fifth time this happened, and only when I was doing assassination type missions, but I was curious if what I was doing was causing a crash and not the mission type, so here are my results:
1) The mission itself isn't the issue. On entering the instance I would attack the mission target and boost straight forward and go as far as possible. On average, I would hit 300~ KM before a CTD 10 times in a row. This did NOT happen if I simply flew by the mission target, I went likely 2000KM with no issues three times.
2) This leads me to believe that distance and the AI are to blame. My only hypothesis is that for whatever reason if an AI ship exceeds this arbitrary 300KM limit, the game freaks out and doesn't know what to do anymore, causing a CTD.
Now, I'm sure that 80% of the reponses are just going to be "git gud", or to just boost in opposite directions (no idea how one would keep track of what direction they should be retreating to regen their shields in order to not hit this crash wall when they're flailing around fighting), however the simple matter is that this should not be happening, no matter the reason someone had that caused it.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/slfzu8/a_somewhat_serious_issue_regarding_single/
