Hi, new Aurora player here, and loving (what little I can understand of) it so far.
However, I can't seem to work out a few problems i'm having:
1. I can't refuel my ships. I sent them out on training for about 8 months, their conditional order for <30% fuel to refuel didn't trigger, but after I noticed I stopped training and ordered them back to Earth. However, when I manually issue the refuel command, I get the Events message " Order not possible - Battle Task Group cannot load movement orders as there are shipyard tasks associated with the fleet"
I think you've got two issues going on here:
1) You've probably got a SY building ships, and it's been told to put the ships into your TG ("Battle Task Group") when it's done. This freezes Battle TG in place at Earth, since if it weren't the ships would magically teleport to it when they were done being constructed. What you should do is transfer the ships you've got in the TG now into a different TG - you can do this by going to the 2nd tab of the F12 screen, selecting them all, and hitting one of the buttons (I forget the name, but it will make a new TG from the selected ships - "split" maybe).
2) ISTR that there's a bug in training, that forgets to look for SY tasks. In other words, you should have gotten an error message when you tried to give this TG orders to go train. On the other hand, I thought this was fixed - are you sure you're playing with 5.01. If I was correct in #1 above (that you've got ships building in the TG), and you've checked in the "about aurora" pulldown that you're really playing 5.0x, then you should go log this issue by posting into the "official 5.0 bugs thread" in the Bugs board (please do NOT open a new thread on that board - Steve uses the 'official' threads in Bugs and Suggestions as a filing cabinet).
2. Is there a way to get colony ships to automatically ship people around? I gave them Primary and secondary orders to pick up and drop colonists, respectively. I also tried it the other way round, and both times the ship just sits in dock over Earth.
Have you created a different colony for them to drop colonists off on? I usually don't screw around with these orders - I just give them orders for a single round-trip (don't forget to refuel) and then hit the cycle-orders (or whatever it's called) checkbox.
Also, as a more general note, how should I make my first exploration through a jump point? Do I build a jump gate, get a jmp capable ship, what research do I need/should I have to do it, etc. The whole situation is slightly beyond me.
I usually build jump ships. With 4.9, one can build small jump drives for e.g. a 1000 ton scout ship - that's one way to make transit but you'll have trouble sending geosurvey and grav survey ships after.
The downside of using a jump gate is that, unless you send through a jump-capable ship, you won't be able to get your ship back (unless you send through a jump gate construction ship to build a gate on the other side). So jump gates for exploration = bad idea
John