A few questions for zero:

Regarding your pathfinding, how are the ships moved? Are you using physics or simple delta location?

I am thinking about having various nodes that tell the ships what speed to do (i.e. this corners sharp, slow down to 20kph etc) but this only applies to the Bullet physics engine in Blender (without it the ships will crash on the first corner): if I use simple delta location the ships will never deviate from the path waypoints as delta location just teleports a shape from one place to another.