What do you mean broken? What am i missing?
I do follow low wakes to get info from the NPC that are ratting out on Pirates targeted by assassination missions
And i did dropped in (wrong) random low wake to find a wing of clean ships.
Yes, they are the only one that works. That's because the point of drop is the same as the wake location. Excuse my rubbish paint skills here, but it's easiest to illustrate.
I use an NPC in the below image, but regardless of whether it's an NPC or a player, if you drop out at a POI, USS, Station or similar using target lock (speed + range within 1Mm/s and 1Mm range, for most situations) , this happens:
Following wakes is the persistence mechanism for the NPC you're pursuing. If you follow the NPC wake, you drop at the wake, but the NPC drops at the station (just like a player would), so this happens:
Obviously that's useless as you're now 1,000km away from the NPC.
If you drop at the station instead of the wake, because you didn't follow the wake any NPC persistance is broken, so this happens.
What should happen is if you follow the wake, you should drop out at the station, not at the wake, and the NPC is persisted.
When you're following an NPC out for mission info, they aren't using a target lock, so they drop at the wake location, and so do you.
So as a final example... if you drop out like this:
Your low wake will be 775km from the mission target. If anyone follows that wake, they'll drop 775km away from the mission target, not at the mission target like you did. They could follow you by just dropping at the mission target instead, but if you're following an NPC, that breaks the persistence chain, so it won't be there.
NOTE: Following high wakes works fine.
NOTE 2: The only low wakes you can follow are manual drop-outs like for mission info updates, and if an NPC collides with a celestial body, as the wake and drop-out are the same location.
EDIT: I should add this to the list of "Things broken longer than the PWA, but still not fixed"
