well, the first time I went through the entire mothership I got to the observation deck and hit that bug where all the people I rescued went back through the teleporter to the engine core (including sally) and the quest couldn't advance. Unaware of this bug at the time, I had quicksaved after it happened.

I spent another few hours going through the whole thing again and now when I get to the top part of the ship, I hit the activation switch for the teleporter so they can join me and nothing happens. the light above the switch goes out but the teleporter remains unpowered.

First off, did I miss hitting some switch before I did my spacewalk that's interfering with this or is it just another bug? I have two saves before reaching the teleporter (my autosave at the beginning of the spacewalk and my quicksave just after my spacewalk but before my decompression), and I keep hitting this problem with the teleporter. I also tried reloading teh whole game to no effect.

I really hate using console commands, but I'd rather not go through the entire 4 hour addon a third time... is there a command to advance this or to get the teleporter started up?

iirc they were all waiting for me when I came back.Did you hit all 3 thingys on top of the ship?

yes on the outside of the ship those three thingys are required to be activated in order to teleport up to the observation deck. the next part of the quest, before you can kill the captain, is to activate the teleporter at the observation deck so that the rest may join you. the first time I ran into a problem, the teleporter activated just fine and the bug that occurred was the one where they come up through it and then go back through it again and through that inaccessible door to a different teleporter leading to the bridge.

my second time through was a different problem, the teleporter on teh observation deck was not activating at all. the light above the switch blinked out like it should but the teleporter remained powered down. through a console command I ,mabaged to teleport back down and they had disappeared (possibly that first bug I encountered triggered earlier this time, I dont know for sure)