So I noticed in the ship designer guide that Jan had mentioned that you could put cargo on your ships. I played with it for awhile and I think I've got it about figured out as it works now. It was a fun adventure. Right now the way to do it is pretty quirky and it does feel like a quick work around to get something working without putting a huge amount of time in to it (time that they don't have much of, efficiency is good!).

Basically it's reverse boarding. This all has do be done in game. If they are non-hostile ships, your life will be easy. If they are hostile ships, life is gonna be ... interesting. When you upload a ship as a flotilla, the game is actually saving the state of that ship at that moment. So if that ship happens to be carrying cargo you've left on it, then viola, it has cargo. It's not randomized, but it's there.

The first problem i ran into is managing the hostility state of the ships. If I'm trying to make a 'set' of ships for the flotilla and they are set to hostile, I have to be careful about how I put that cargo in. I found that if I spawned a ship with the 'warp to ship' option enabled, that ship would be flagged as mine, and the other ships that were supposed to be allied with this one I warped to, would instead start attacking.

So. I started doing ships one by one to start with. To avoid messing with hostility states, I would use debug to spawn the ship directly on the airlock of my current ship. I'd give it a quick shot then dock as quickly as possible. Before going into the ships I used the debug menu to give myself the best armor I could find so the hostile npc's that I didn't want to kill (they are for the flotilla after all) would not obliterate me. Then I'd go to the cargo bay and fill it with what I wanted. Most trading goods can be found in the debug menu after all.

Datacores were a bit different. Can't find those in debug, so I had to hunt some down.

When the ship was loaded with the goods, I'd export that single ship into it's own flotilla. I consider these 'prepared' ships.

For making fleets I'd actually hit 'delete' to go do the debug ship spawn menu and then hit 'insert'. This will open up a folder menu. Go into the 'Dumps' Folder and you'll see any flotillas you've created up to now. This is where the 'prepared' ships are kept. It's from these flotilla files that I've made groups of 'prepared' ships. Since the flotilla upload option only cares about the ship state at the moment, you can easily use flotillas to make other flotillas.

Wheee.

Edit: Oh yeah, just be aware. Constantly accessing the dumps folder and spawning ships seems to make the game pretty unstable. It crashed a lot during this whole process. So don't be surprised when it goes and takes some work with it.