Just discovered this thread- I arrived at the Elite party a little late, spent most of my time in that universe on FFE. Yeah yeah, I know, heretic and all that, but I found the game pretty aweseome. Just wanted to say thanks for the link to the download site, I've been looking for that ever since I realised my old install disks had died a death (or disappeared). Might well get back into it soon.
And yeah, the stuff Geraldine posted on true relativistic space combat is absolutely correct- after the first few hours of gameplay I never switched my set speed on again, even in planetary atmospheres most of the stuff you have to do yourself (military missions etc) relies on such high-speed maneuvering that the set speed function borders on useless, you just have to know when to start accelerating away from the planet so you don't crash into the installation you're supposed to photograph or bomb or whatever. Plus, space combat is so much easier with it switched off. Most of my "civil" atmospheric flight was done with autopilot anyway, and after a while I almost forgot the set speed function existed.
My pointers for space combat would generally be that it's easier to do if you switch your engines off, most of what you need to do is small "jinks" to avoid laser fire or longer burns to cut inside the paths of incoming missiles and in the intervening time you should focus on marksmanship with your lasers to save money. Use whatever you find most convenient to mark your targets and aim dead center on the box- as long as you've got enough heatsinks you can keep firing for a while, and lasers have a very long range in space.
With larger ships it's less of an issue- one of my favourite pirate hunting rigs was a Panther clipper packed with shield generators and heatsinks with dogfighting missiles and the biggest lasers I could find. Anything short of a plasma cannon couldn't kill my shields as fast as they regenerated and it only took me one or two hits to kill anything a pirate used.
My favourite military-use ship was the Cobra II, I think, and I did save up enough to buy myself the Carrier, though the bugged lower turret was a major greivance with that ship (it would damage the ship when fired). Did like the Saker II you started the game with, though, with a military drive fitted it was an excellent, excellent courier vessel, very good hyperspace range and very fast to boot.
I didn't use an exploit until I got the Thargoid ship at the end of the game, though. I may have used a little bug to overflow the number for cargo space on it. I had a veritable mansion in there, as well as enough space left over to store the entire GDP of your average core world in cotton wool.
Heh, yeah, that was a good game.
Not talking about slowdowns in Amiga version 
Gosh, now I am skating on thin ice, really 
