[V19 Stable] "Ghost soldiers" in dropship- crash

Hello all,

From what I can extrapolate, this is a somewhat common bug, but I've been working on defining the exact characteristics of it.

The basic summary of the glitch is that the 'equip soldier' screen shows there are eight icons under the dropship, but lists only six names under the soldier info screen. Switch to the 'placement in dropship' screen, and there are eight icons.

I cross-referenced the names on board to my roster...they had both died in the recent base defense operation.

Spooky.

Anyway, deploying the dropship with the 'ghost troopers' works, with the exception of there only being six (tangible) troops on the battlefield. I guess the other two's spirits deploy, but the aethereal doesn't exactly help.

For a more specific breakdown of the glitch's parameters:

• The glitch seemingly only occurs following base defense operations when wounded or dead units are on that craft's roster.
  
• Attempting to move the 'ghost' icons in the dropship screen crashes to desktop; there is no way to remove them from the dropship.
  

This leads me to the conclusion (keep in mind I have about one semester's worth of high school programming training, and I was bad at it operating on that level) that there is an item in the game's code that removes casualties from the roster that operates based on dropship deployment; completely registering casualties only on missions that occur outside the base. Since there is no dropship involved in base defense operations, the script only does half its job, removing them from the soldier roster, but not the dropship roster. This dissonance causes a crash when I point it out to the game.

It's very annoying, and is one of the reasons I've restarted the game about three dozen times (my attention span notwithstanding).

EDIT:

A quick (and painful) fix to this issue is to scrap and replace the dropship, tossing the lingering spirits of the fallen soldiers into the junk heap; evidently they cling to the dropship in death as they do in life. But $100,000 hurts.

Yes, this exact thing just happened to me. Straight after a base defence so you're quite right as to the cause.

Very annoying.

Just posting to add that this has happened TWICE to me now, both times after base defences where the ghost soldiers were killed: their places on the dropship remained and if you try to re-arrange them on the dropship passenger screen the game crashes.

They are un-removable from the dropship after dying in the base mission and like the OP says the only way to get rid of them is to scrap the dropship and buy another. This means that each base mission effectly costs you 100,000 if you leave anybody in the dropship and they get killed.

Please fix this.