I've been playing Aurora on and off for a while now, and I've always had some questions that I wasn't able to locate in the forums or the wiki. However, it's been a bit since my last search for these things, and I'm feeling a little too lazy to do it again, so let me apologize in advance if these topics have been covered.
1. When missiles explode without impacting something, does the explosion itself do damage?
In example, say I was to construct a 5000 ton missile that's all warhead, put it in space somewhere, move a ship right up next to it, and then blast it with some lasers. When the thing explodes, would that ship get rocked by the explosion and take some serious damage, or would it be ignored because there was no contact?
No, missiles only do damage if they hit something.
2. Sort of off the previous question, does the radiation from detonated missiles affect those objects which haven't been hit by the missile? Also, do all missiles have radiation, or just ICBMs/enhanced rad warheads? I'm lead to believe that they do, due to the 'enhanced' bit it talks about, but I'm still curious.
Radiation effects are added to a colony if missiles are fired at anything on the planet. All missiles cause some radiation/dust to be added to the colony, enhanced ones cause a bigger effect.
3. Is there a maximum population for colonies, or a point where the population becomes a burden on the economy/resource of the planet? I could probably check this with the SM, but I just realized the question while writing this.
No maximum, however population growth rate declines as population increases and more of the population as a percentage is placed into the service sector. Even the most heavily populated planet that is at colony cost zero will keep 20% in manufacturing sector available to work in your installations.
4. Do shipyards have a maximum size? I remember one game I let one of my shipyards run on continuous expansion up to around 450k tons before it exhausted my supply of neutronium due to the ridiculous costs. Would I just be able to get that thing to build a 10 million ton ship if I had the resource?
No maximum size. However really big ship designs can run into various overflow problems with certain values which imposes an eventual practical limit.
5. For that NPR that I decide to automatically generate at the start of a game: how far away is it usually placed? I've never encountered an NPR, just star swarm. Admittedly, I haven't gotten around to getting a game past 150 years of play due to hard drive crashes and database updates, but I still feel I should have encountered at least one of them.
Random. Sometimes it can be far away, sometimes it is in the first system you explore.
6. Not really a question about how to play the game, but has anybody ever managed to legitly research all the techs? Those prices get insane.
It is possible to do by harvesting tech from ruins and npr's and dedicating a large portion of your construction capability to building extra research labs. Focusing on the increased research rate early on also helps immensely. Still don't be surprised to see it take 1000+ years.