You mean like missiles and stuff? Any equipment dock will take them, even if they don't sell them. Sometimes you have to sell a bunch, wait a couple of seconds for the inventory to clear, and sell some more. The only thing that's really hard to sell is nvidium and I doubt you have any of that. (Conventional wisdom is to simply buy a cheap, used trade ship, fill it up with your nvidium, then sell the entire ship. You'll only get half price but it's much less hassel.)
Even without that, though, sending ships to the other side of the galaxy isn't hard. If the ship has a jump drive and enough energy cells you just tell it to jump to where you want to go and you're done (make sure to turn auto-jump on in the command console). If not, you can mostly just tell it to go to the destination station and let it chug its way there. There are only a couple of Xenon sectors that might get in the way. If one of those looks like it will be part of the path then just send the ship off to another sector first then tell it to go to the right destination.
You can set sell and buy prices or give them MK2 trade software and best buy/sell orders and they will take off? Not sure if they become autonomous after their next trade, or if I have keep sending trade commands to them after each trade.
MK2 with best buy/best sell can work but by far the easiest way to do it is to just use that CAG software. Set the trade ship's home base (using the command console again, there's a lot of neat stuff in there) to be your mine and tell the ship to land there. Transfer a bunch of cash to your factory (a million credits should be enough) and start up the CAG. One of the more abysmal janitors in your factory will be forced into the job. He'll then pilot the ship and start buying energy cells to power the mine, using the credits the mine has to buy the energy. After the mine gets enough energy cells, the pilot will also start selling the ore/silicon. Then you'll be making profitsss!
One big factor for this is the range, which I think is set on the factory itself. If you set the range to 10 then the trader will only look within sectors that are 10 or fewer jumps away. I would set that range pretty low to start with, like maybe 2 or 3. That way your trade ship won't try to go huge distances just to try and save 1000 credits. Once the CAG janito… <ahem> pilot learns how to use the jump drive, then you can push the range up.
Also do they need satellites to find the best prices in other sectors?
Yeah, they need some kind of presence, be it satellite or ship. I like to turn on the special CAG option that tells the traders to only trade in sectors with a satellite. That lets me control exactly what sectors I deem safe enough for trading without messing with sector blacklists/whitelists.
All the info for CAG ships can be found
in the Egosoft topic. That will tell you what software the ship will need and what all the options do.
Still waiting for the learning curve to flatten.
It is flat! It's not exactly level, of course….
That's what I've really enjoyed about this game. There's always something new to learn and benefits for learning it.
BTW, I assume the found Advanced Perseus M3 is a better combat ship than the found Advanced Pirate Eclipse, although it has less cargo space, which I suppose is fine for a combat ship.
Heck, I dunno, let me see…. (looks over at
the M3 ships) Shields are the same but the eclipse recharges them quicker. Perseus is a good bit faster. Eclipse has two turrets and can use mass drivers, which are pretty good for shooting down those little ships buzzing arround. I don't know - it's a close call. I suspect the eclipse will be better against the M5s and the perseus will be better against other M3s.