Logging on to a full station

I've never really seen a full-on PvP battle and in fact never really ever seen a large amounts of Commanders at once. I'm currently on voyage to Sagittarius A* and then will pop over to Colonia and stay there a while. With the community goals buzzing around at the moment and previously had to fix Jaques Station, Colonia is quite the popular location with people buzzing around the stations everywhere.

I've always wondered, but not known, what happens if say you landed on a pad at a station, and lots and lots of other Commanders went and landed at the same station. If you log out, surely it would free-up your landing pad for someone else to land on.

But then, what happens when you log back in? Do you queue up for the pads to be free? Do you simply spawn in? What happens if theres no space left on the station?

o7

Any station can be full, but it's fairly rare with the large spinning space stations. If the station is full and you request docking, you will be denied until somebody clears the pad.

Key detail: the game works on peer to peer instances with a limit on how many ships can be in an instance.

If you log out, your ship basically vanishes. If you log out docked in a full station, your landing pad clears up and becomes available after a little while.

When you log in, the servers help you find an appropriate instance. If you had logged out while docked, you'll end up in an instance where there's an appropriate pad free that you then take up. If all instances of the station have full pads of your ship size and larger, then you'll end up in a new instance.