capturing ships is tricky because you have to get the shields almost down to 0. i used to use the autopilot for combat. as soon as it says "target is now in firing range" you could start firing. be aware that with some lasers the HEPT's for example they do have some recoil so you can miss.

I got the game yesterday, do I need any scripts to help me? also, can we play the abion prelude and reunion addons?

so what actual scripts have you worked on and what do each one of them do

could you write a script that gives coord information for the sector map? for example if you wanted to know where your solar power plant was in relation to your crystal mine or where it was in relation to a silicon asteroid mine then you could work out the best place to put your crystal fab because one of the primary resources for the manufacture of crystals is silicon. visually this would be easy to work out obviously but we can't do that. we would need to know coords so we could use the autopilot upgrade to say take us to here and then drop the factory so you can have the fab close to both mine and power plant to minimise travel times for transports.
also you'd need to make a script that deals with the factory screens like i mentioned before. so you can determine price what races can and can't dock etc. also i think you might need to develop a script that gives a layout of the galaxy map. it does use north south east and west directions so i wonder if the script could detail which direction the system is from another. for example you'd need to kno how to get from argon prime to cloudbase south west. that will become an important system as that's where the gona temple is and you'll have some missions to do there. but you'd need to know how to get there from argon prime. i don't even mean flying there manually you would need to be able to tell the autopilot where you want it to take you. one of the good things about the autopilot in the later games is that you can literally tell it to go from point a to point b and dock. oh by the way it's 2 south and 1 west from argon prime to cloudbase south west. lol that used to be one of my factory sectors. not to mention it's very close to paranid space.

I can certainly try. Regarding geography, the galaxy map actually let you navigate from sector to sector using the arrow keys, and you can use OCR to tell which sector you’re in. It’s not perfect obviously, but it does make things easier. Also, auto pilot can navigate you to any sector pretty much whenever, which is very helpful, as you point out. I will definitely try and figure out the coordinates issue at some point. It’s also worth pointing out that many sites have information on where prebuilt stations are, and so forth,  which can be very useful for navigation and placement of things. The thing is, auto pilot can take you to any sector you’ve seen previously, or heard of, and it’s generally pretty easy to target sectors manually, so I don’t quite know what a script would do for us that is actually necessary in that case.  Still, I will try, though probably won’t have anything ready for tomorrow.

Yeah, that's reasonable. I can probably come up with something for coordinates, just need to have a think about what exactly I want it to do. Part of the problem is that at the moment I haven't been exposed to the factory and station building side of the game yet, so this is all kind of abstract.

I'll keep everyone posted. FOr the moment my plan in the stream tomorrow is to talk about the basics of trading, navigation, and demonstrate what I have so far or what I can come up with before then. I need to take things one step at a time

YEah, I'll probably start selling energy cells to factories like that for a bit, at least. I've been reading some starting guides with decent moneymaking suggestions.

Simba, to undock you hit "escape," from the station screen, and then "enter." It's not as seamless as the docking process.

ALso, when you undock you'll want to hit "s," a few times to bring your ship downwards, and away from the station. If you don't it's possible to ram into it unintentionally. You have to be a small distance away before autopilot will kick in.

ok zac some guys from Egosoft will be there tomorrow night. I've had it confirmed by Bernd over email. not sure who exactly but they will be there. at 7PM Germany time tomorrow night.

That's awesome. I'll try to give a decent demo. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to bind my trade script to a hotkey, which is probably going to require fussing with the controls menu, which is a little intimidating with its sheer size.

well it would be a platform i guess whereby you can ask for their assistance if you feel that necessary. at the very least it will be exposure which could only be a good thing for us in the long run.