I saw this asked by several people, myself included, but couldn't get a solid answer on whether they were in or not. They were absent from the patch notes but from my experience last night I can confirm they're in! I've got some screenshots and a small bit of context here:
Source: https://imgur.com/a/zrPvzid
Edit: Had some trouble posting the images directly so there's an imgur link with descriptions below each screenshot I was able to snatch. The long short of it is that they were present and fighting for the 4 back to back High Intensity CZ's I did. The small amount of testing I did was to ride the Dropship back to the station after the first one and then redeploy to the same combat zone to see if they were still present and they were. After that one I relogged instead of riding back and the ships were immediately present on a relog/fresh instance which indicates to me that they were indeed NPC's and not player ships. It also looks like, in the second picture, you can see the new AA turrets firing on one of the ships (the red tinted bullets flying over my head)
Edit: Had some trouble posting the images directly so there's an imgur link with descriptions below each screenshot I was able to snatch. The long short of it is that they were present and fighting for the 4 back to back High Intensity CZ's I did. The small amount of testing I did was to ride the Dropship back to the station after the first one and then redeploy to the same combat zone to see if they were still present and they were. After that one I relogged instead of riding back and the ships were immediately present on a relog/fresh instance which indicates to me that they were indeed NPC's and not player ships. It also looks like, in the second picture, you can see the new AA turrets firing on one of the ships (the red tinted bullets flying over my head)
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