This game is basic turn based, here’s the Q, you give me the A
Why is the carrier and the ships not destroyed?
How does abandoned stars work?
That looks like a bug. Did that happen in the old or new server?
This happened in the new server. What happened is, player A’s star got taken over by player B. Then player B abandoned the star. When I clicked on the star it showed an unoccupied star belonging to nobody with a carrier belonging to player B with 10 ships.
Actually, the old server. Sorry.
Hi @ReoCyan! This looks interesting and I don’t know the answer (I’m pretty new) and apparently Jay doesn’t either (that means it’s a good question) I just want to add a related question that you post sparked. If you have a star with an ally’s ships on it and abandon the star does that remove all your ally’s ships too? Could it be really bad for you if you ally with an enemy that would do that to you? If you want to play on the new server there are a few glitches like this that can get fixed if @JayKyburz learns about them so, good job for coming to the forum 
Since it’s on the old server I’m surprised no one asked about that yet but I guess it has to have some specific things happen to see that happen.
The basics of abandoning stars: (You probably know this already but just in case you don’t) As you probably saw in the pop-up that is shown when you try to abandon a star “It’s Economy, Industry and Science will remain, but all ships at this star will be destroyed.” In the help section it says “Once every production period you can abandon a star for another player to capture without combat. The stars Economy, Industry, Science and Warp Gate will remain intact when captured by another player. While a star is abandoned, a stars Industry will not produce ships, nor will its Warp Gate enable carriers to move at warp speed. Any ships left at a star when you abandon it will be destroyed.” This is mainly used when transferring stars to allies when you want the infrastructure to remain past the transition. I assume player B was trying to do this when it happened. It is most likely a glitch as Jay said (he would know) and he will fix it. Sorry if that’s not helpful.
By the way, what does the green circle mean. It doesn’t look like a glitch but it could be an unused graphic.
Update: My turn has passed and the carrier moved. The star is abandoned. This seems like a transitionary state.
The small circles is used to show the color of the fleet if its different to the color of the star. You only ever see it in games where there are formal alliances.
In this game you can see that orange has a bunch of fleets helping defend red.
My guess is that somehow abandoning the star didn’t destroy the ships somehow. Could be wrong, but that seems most likely to me. Could be maybe fixed by more thoroughly getting rid of the ships or smth, or maybe adding a check at the end of every turn that makes sure that no unoccupied stars have ships on them? I have no clue how np4 is coded, so these suggestions are probably useless, but I hope this helps at least a little bit