As for orders, you should give all the orders you want at the same time. You can pull off some nice drifting this way. This will let you control your movement with the WASD keys or arrows or whatever you set it to in settings and move like the AI does. Hold down shift key and your ship will face whichever direction your mouse is in. The other thing is that ship facing doesn't matter all that much.

If you have shields up or fighters set to engage your flux will always be >0% and so you will never catch any enemy ships unless you're close enough to force their shields up How's your flux? Ships at 0% flux gain a huge speed boost. I think I shall try a little smaller next time! I attacked a bounty fleet which had a battleship and it wasn't where despite taking down most of the enemy fleet with some fantastic piloting, my lack of effective small-ship support meant I was eventually overwhelmed by the more nimble battleship. Things got very spicy when I discovered a Legion XIV Battlecarrier, which made me get rather too big for my boots. Unable to cope with the costs anymore I had to keep cutting down my fleet, losing the money I invested into my optimised mining vessels, taking up trade missions and salvage missions just to keep in the red (and many times my crew kept quitting on the spot due to backpay long owed).ДЇor a time I managed to stabilise my finances by becoming a bounty-hunter using one cruiser to hunt small-fry pirates whilst my mining fleet acted as a salvage fleet. By the time I reached 1,600 mining strength of vessels and 17,000 cargo space, I was dumping so much ore & volatiles on markets that I was severely depreciating the price whilst increasing my running costs. The larger and less nimble my fleet was, the more I was losing from accidents in supplies, machinery and manpower.

Fool that I was, I did not see how I was eating into my own profit margins.

Things were going well I was managing to rake in 120,000 profit each run, expanding my mining fleet until I reached 1,000 mining strength. Tried playing a legitimate lawful astrominer (nexerellin mod) in a post-collapse world (most planets are derelict, very few human controlled planets). Ah damn, I got destroyed by my own greed.

Starsector sseth