Signed in to say I love the game, and to voice my enthusiasm for a possible Aurora II.
It just makes me very very sad to see such awesomeness held back basically only by the technology of its time. I knowyour dev on Aurora II is on a little hiatus, but I thought I'd just weigh in on it and the advantages of developing it in modern C# over old pre-. NET VB.
1. Themable windows and newer controls. Pretty obvious but the UI elements haven't aged well. Its functional, but UI standards have moved on.
2. Database. It breaks my heart every time I read on forums about some new fancy feature idea, but which isn't done due to performance issues. Much of this I would blame on the Access database. My advice would be using a SQL Express or SQLite database, both of which should give significant performance improvements. The nice thing about Access though is it can be used to access and maintain other databases if the SQL Management Express is undesired, but just have the actual data sit on a better database.
3. nHibernate or ADO. NET Entity Framework. In a previous post storing all the data in memory as opposed in the database to speed up was mentioned. These two, if you are unfamiliar with them, are ways of reaching a compromise. They are basically database middleware that turns rows and columns into actual objects with methods and properties, making it MUCH easier to work with and develop game logic, then afterwards save the objects again as rows and columns, all without even a single line of SQL.
4. Databinding. Right now the multiple windows don't communicate very well. If something changes the other windows have to be manually updated which doesn't always catch everything. By using databinding the controls will update themselves when the underlying data changes, resulting in a lot less code you have to implement.
5. Performance. Modern . NET has changes A LOT of things improving all round performance.
6. Installer. That installer you got leaves MUCH to be desired. Honestly. Installer projects these days are much simpler and allows you create a much better working setup without asking to install so manu useless DLLs.
These are all straight technology advantages received simply by using modern . NET. Honestly you don't have to use C#, you can keep VB, they both use the same libraries, though I would advise C# for the better power.
There have been some suggestions to use XNA, but I must say I don't think its a good idea for Aurora. While XNA is pretty epic if you quickly want to throw together a DirectX game, Aurora isn't 3D and consists mostly of forms and windows, neither of which XNA does well, or at all really.
Now for some game mechanics musings:
As for Jump Gates in a hyperspace world? Way I am imagining it is kinda like EVE accelerators or like existing mass drivers. The jump gate creates a hyperspace bubble around the ship, then launches that ship at high speed at the paired Jump gate, which then catches the ship and pops its bubble. This is why it is important to have them paired, since you need a beacon to aim for, and since systems move pretty fast compared to one another. And naturally you need something to catch you on the other end, which makes the destruction of a catching jump gate while you have ships in transit a pretty scary thing.
These jump gates are created independantly but can be paired with another, perhaps even have its pairing changed multiple times, and perhaps even able to lie INSIDE the hyperspace limit. They are expensive, but allows non-hyperspace ships to hyperspace (much cheaper ships), its fast (though highly performant ships may be faster) and reliable, since all ships will emerge near the endpoint gate.
Its disadvantages would be that they take time to build, can be destroyed and all ships emerge near the endpoint, meaning that the gates can be camped.
So in short, would work same way jump points work now. You find a jump point, take grav jump ship or military vessels through, explore, if you decide you want a colony build a gate which allows your freighters and colony ships access to the system.
