Sweet.  Glad I won't need it I was worried about Mass Drivers, and how to get them to work. 

I'm writing all of this down so that maybe I can contribute to the tutorial.  Is there anyway to break a game out so that it could be attached to a tutorial? Like an already played game so that the tutorial could be written with that game?

@Ziusudra: I built 2 Military Academies and I got another scientist. . . 25% bonus to. . Logistics/Ground.  Ah well, I'll take it.  Maybe a protege of the first. . . hmm. . .

Where are the save games, or the database stored? I'd like to copy it just in case I make a major mistake in the next few months.  I'm about to get freighters, load them with mass drivers and automated mines and send them to Venus, and, just in case I make a major mistake, I'd like something to go back to.

@Thiosk: Awesome reference.  That helps me out so much.  Thank you very much!

Yeah thats really important.  I thought something else and built 30 levels, now I have so many damn officers scientists and administrators that I really don't have a clue what to do with them all.

Ok missiles totally baffled me at first.  Go to the ship design thread and find my Snake Missile thread.

In short, when you design missiles, you have WARHEAD, ENGINES, FUEL, and AGILITY.

Don't worry about the rest, or that multistage stuff.  You'll get there eventually.  I'm not there yet.

Each interger you put in those boxes is 1 missile size point, or MSP.
So if from the list above, you put 0.25 in each of the boxes, you'll have a 1 MSP missile.

Now heres where I was really confused-- Just because you put a "1" in the warhead, that doesnt give you a "Warhead: 1" missile.  Your warhead technology improves Warhead value per MSP, so a more advanced warhead tech will give you a bigger "Warhead" value for the same amount of MSP.  Confused yet?

Early on your tech will be smege.  So don't worry about it too much.  From that snake missile thread, you can see that i had Hullspace and Missile Size confused for my first run, so I made an enormous missile that was totally pointless.

However, on the second page, my anti-missile-missle (highly agile, short range) is pretty good. 

You want your anti ship missiles, size 6 or size 4, to have reasonable range (~100 m km) and get there reasonably fast (30km/s) with some wiggle room in both directions.  Once you get your missle pretty much set up, you can dink up the agility and dink down the engine speed to improve the to hit.  I'm going after really fast aliens in my current game, their slow ships go 9km/s, so my missiles need good "to hit ratings"