Yeah if i understand what lordlolek is describing correctly, you essentially just setup your formation with scene components (and you can animate them or w/e you want to do).
For each scene component, spawn an actor and then attach the actor to the scene component.
if its not a game you dont have to worry about optimizing it beyond that really, I wouldn’t think.
This will work the same as child actors, except you will be able to use the detach node and it should work.