I recently found a crashed ship that had an extra slot and some better tech installed so I excitedly scrapped all my ship upgrades, transferred my loot and set about repairing the new ship.
It was a fairly modest upgrade from 18 slots to 19 but it did have a sweet warp drive sigma installed. I dismantled some of the phase beam upgrades and replaced them with the same photon cannon upgrades that I installed on my previous 2 ships. They were +1 impact damage, +1 cooldown and +1 accelerated fire.
This was all going well until, several systems later, I encountered some pesky pirates attacking a poor, helpless Gek trading ship. I immediately boosted over there and set about rescuing the innocent traders only to realise that the new ship was unable to lock on to the enemy ships! I still have the 3 white markers that highlight the ship but they would not lock on, which meant the target that leads the ship did not appear. This happened automatically, as soon as I started to fire my photon cannon, on both my previous ships.
This made actually hitting the ships extremely difficult and I wasn't able to take the pirates down before I ran out of resources to keep my shield up and thus ended the story of Gen 5.
Upon the birth of Gen 6, I was unable to figure out how or why the targeting system was missing from my new ship. It is not mentioned in the description of any of the ship systems or upgrades I currently know.
Did I experience a bug or am I missing an upgrade that allows the targeting system to function?
Edit: I am using patch 1.08 on PS4.
Best Answer
This was an update to the targeting system that was introduced in 1.08. It now makes targeting less immediate. It's not something specific to your ship, and I do not think it is possible to alter how your targeting system works.
From the reddit thread discussing the changes introduced in 1.08 (since no official patch notes have been released):