If you have tinkered with the Mission Builder in CFS2 you may have noticed that non combat ships don't follow the waypoints you assign; they normally turn until they are heading north and then proceed straight. This makes creating missions with convoys a bit awkward.

Well, there's an easy fix to this bug, and HawkeyeII from cfsforums discovered it (great tip, HawkeyeII, thanks for sharing it, and thanks also to Speedbrake for pointing it out to me).

The fix is very simple, it's enough to place a gun on board the non combat ships and they will behave correctly following the waypoints specified in the Mission Builder.

I have placed a .50 caliber machine gun on each of the non combat ships modifying the corresponding .dp files; I also constrained the movement of the gun so that it is locked and pointing down. Therefore if you use the files I'm providing in their current form the non combat ships WILL NOT FIRE at you, just like the original ships provided with CFS2, but will follow the waypoints you specify in the Mission Builder.

If on the other hand you would like to see non combat ships fire back at you with their puny single .50 machine gun, the procedure is very simple. Open the .dp files with notepad, find the following section:

[GUNSTATIONS]
;gunstation.0=0,-23,1,0.15,839,2,0.01,500,2,40,1d1*14,-3.537001,9.452917,24.841764,0,0,0,-180,180,75,-10,1.6
gunstation.0=0,-23,1,0.15,839,2,0.01,500,2,40,1d1*14,-3.537001,9.452917,24.841764,0,0,0,0,0,-10,-10,1.6

As you can see, there are 2 gunstation lines; the first one is remarked with a semicolon ";". To enable the on board .50 machine gun, all you have to do is remove the ";" in front of the first line and place it in front of the second line. Then save and exit. The non combat ships will now be able to fire as well as follow the waypoints.