I want to put a dock in a coastal town where the player can purchase a ticket to take ship elsewhere. I want the player to go to an office, buy a ticket, go to a ship and give the ticket then the player will go into the ship, enter the cabin and the ship will sail. The player may then go out onto the deck for a while and explore the ship that will appear in mid journey, like the bloated float does. When the player re enters the cabin, the ship will arrive in dock. I want the ship to be able to physically disappear from the original dock and appear in the new one regularly so the player can actually miss the sailing. The ship will leave and dock overnight. Help.

I suppose the easier solution is to have three ships placed in the CS (dock A, dock B and mid-ocean) and a quest script to enable-disable them at the right times.

On the other extreme, visually moving the ships would be a solution several orders of magnitude more complex to develop.

The script for the easy one could, at a given time, say 6 AM, check the player distance from the ship at dock A and, if the distance is more than 20,000 units (~5 cells), disable the ship.
At 6 PM, if the player is not close to dock B, enable the ship there, simulating the arrival

If the player is closer and can see the ship, you delay the 'departure' until the player either leave the area (in which case you disable the ship) or board the ship and enter the cabin.

You also need three overlapping doors inside the cabin leading to the three ships. If the player is in the cabin, you enable the door leading to the ship in mid ocean during the period of the trip. After some time, as soon as the player enters the cabin, you enable the door leading to the ship in dock B and the ship itself.

The same approach can be used to the trip back, of course.

Cor thats complex but I see what you mean by it. I am looking at Sides sailing ships and that looks pretty fantastic, I just need to get it to work without any connection to the vanilla game. I need help with that aspect of the mod really.

If you are OK with the three static ships approach (no movements) I can write the scripts for you quite easily (OBSE required - I don't think I know how to write non-OBSE scripts anymore).

Although I suppose a moving ship would be much better, I can't offer to help with anything that complex because, like you, I have my hands full with my own large mod project.

Sorry, very busy week at work. Let me see what I can do with moving ships and Side. Then I will definitely come back to you. Thats a very kind offer mate.