I have made a second breakthrough (just by watching the above videos really) – that the state of the star map is important! This is something that’s completely non-obvious visually, but in the early 90s you would have been expected to have discovered in the manual. Scrolling the map around doesn’t really indicate that you’re selecting anything – the star in the centre of the screen highlights and you get some information about it, but if you leave the map with that star highlighted it becomes your selected destination!
This is the key to getting the hyperspace option to appear (it’s also dependent on the amount of fuel you’re carrying, so it can take a bit to diagnose why it isn’t there). With that revelation, I can finally travel between locations. And that means I can make some money by trading – buy goods classified as exports, take them to places where those goods are imports.
So my bank account is going upwards, but at a very slow rate – and it takes so much clicking to go back and forth! Scroll to destination star, hyperspace, call up the solar system map, zoom it in, twirl it around a bit, click around on your destination until it registers, autopilot, advance time, come in for landing. I think I’ll aim for buying a ship with a bit more space in its boot as a first goal.
