Questions from a new Player

[alvin853 (OP)]

I recently discovered this game and got into it pretty quickly, with the help of some tutorials.   But I have some questions/issues that I would like to talk about:

• Low fuel ships (<20%) halt the auto advancement of time after every major tick.   I designed my survey ships to stay out for several years, and with a couple of them around I constantly have one or more below 20% fuel and have to manually advance time.   Can I change some setting so each ship will only interrupt the timer once or not at all since I have conditional refuels anyway?
• In addition to 1, I have set up refuel tankers around the galaxy and all my survey ships have conditional orders to refuel at tanker or colony.   But only the geological survey ships actually use the tankers, while the grav survey ships always return to Sol system to refuel at one of my colonies.   Seeing as the only difference is grav survey ships being classified as military, do I need seperate tanker designs for commercial and military vessels?
• I got into a battle with some alien ships, we used up all our missiles, I tried to get within beam range, but their ships were faster, so they stayed just outside my weapon range.   But since they had less range, the enemy ships couldn't shoot either.   I had my fire control on auto, and the time would only increment 5 seconds at a time to tell me enemy ships were out of weapon range over and over.   After advancing for half an hour in steps of 5 seconds without any change, I told my fire control to cease fire, and after that I could advance for 60 seconds at a time, but it still took forever to get my ships out of the system to finally be able to play normal again.   It's not fun to advance days of ingame time in steps of 60 seconds with literally nothing happening, so how do I deal with that? I was about to simply destroy my ships just so I could continue playing. 
• While defending from the missiles I wanted my beam weapons to help with point defense, but their PD settings got reset after each tick, so I constantly had to resubmit the PD orders via the combat window or they wouldn't shoot at all.  How do I apply the settings correctly so they get saved?
• I had hostile ships jump into Sol system and shoot anti missile missiles at civilian transport ships, which again took forever real time to advance a couple minutes of ingame time of not a whole lot happening.   The enemies ran out of missiles eventually, and then I found my civilian shipping line sending small colony ships after the alien vessels.   Are my civilian friends trying to suicide ram into aliens to deal with the threat? Right now they have chased the enemy ships beyond 2x Pluto. 
• Venus says its atmosphere is 65% nitrogen and 35% carbon dioxide, but at 50atm each, how does that work? Is the pressure so high some of the nitrogen got liquified?
• In the galaxy map the survey stats for Sol read as 621/620 bodys surveyed.  .  .   again I don't quite see how that works out. 

That's what I noticed so far, didn't want to make a thread for each question, hope this is okay.   Thanks everyone and especially Steve for this awesome game Mars

[Sematary]

Numbers 1, and 2, in short no.
Number 3, Welcome to Aurora.
Number 4, yes they most likely are trying to ram. While the player can't ram, NPRs and civilians can ram but don't always.
Number 5, I am not sure what the question here is. Venus has an incredibly thick atmosphere and as such its much much denser than our own.
Number 6, I am actually not sure about that.

A little bit of a longer answer on the interrupts is its a feature of the game. It wants to give you a chance to do something about a perceived problem while you still can do something about it. They can not be shut off.

[MarcAFK]

Your numbers are a little off.
Anyway off the top of my head, since I don't have my game around to check mechanics.
1) no sadly.
2) I noticed the same oddity myself but coundnt track down a cause.
3) try disabling sensors completely in the system then advance time just enough that you fleet can get out of range. Then turn sensors back on. I believe the sensor disable is on the system map.
4) it can be tricky to set up pd correctly, I can't help with it ATM but you need to be careful or it fails.
5)looks likely. They shouldn't waste colonists like that. Try disabling sensors and advancing time a little, they might stop chasing ships they can't see.
6)odd, I'll have a look later.
7) earth might be special since it starts out surveyed, that could account for the oddity.

[alvin853 (OP)]

His numbers are off, because I added point 4 with the edit

[Jumpp]

3. In a situation like that, where the fleets are powerless to hurt one another and they're just dragging the game down to no purpose, I would put on my GameMaster hat and declare "Okay, that fleet escapes." Then I'd activate SM mode and just move my fleet to some safe position about as far from my homeworld as it presently is, and have it fly home from there. That'd preserve the time and fuel spent to get home, without the annoyance of brief update windows.

[alvin853 (OP)]

3.  In a situation like that, where the fleets are powerless to hurt one another and they're just dragging the game down to no purpose, I would put on my GameMaster hat and declare "Okay, that fleet escapes. " Then I'd activate SM mode and just move my fleet to some safe position about as far from my homeworld as it presently is, and have it fly home from there.  That'd preserve the time and fuel spent to get home, without the annoyance of brief update windows.

Okay that sounds like a good idea, I just haven't used SM mode so far, guess I need to familiarize myself with the possibilities

[Jumpp]

To do this particular operation:

1. Activate SM mode under SpaceMaster on the main menu.
2. Open up a fresh Task Groups panel. If you had one open already, close it and open a new one. Otherwise the SpaceMaster options won't be available.
3. Go to your fleet. Queue orders for it to go all the way home.
4. In the "Time and Distance" section of the Task Groups panel, switch the radio button to "All Orders"
5. Note the distance home.
6. Find some body or fleet or JP that's in a safe area, and is about as far from home as your fleet.
7. Go back to the Task Groups window and select your fleet.
8. Switch to the History/Officers/Misc tab.
9. In the top right corner of that panel there's a "Set Task Group Position (SM Only)" control. Enter the system and body/fleet/JP you want to move your fleet to.
10. Press the "Save" button.
11. Turn SpaceMaster back off. (It's good practice to leave it off unless you need it on. This protects you from some possible mistakes.)
12. Close and reopen any windows that are still in SM mode.