First and foremost you should learn how to navigate your cockpit. This is done using the following (default and customised) control bindings:
- 1 - Navigation and enemy subsystem view
- 2 - Communications
- 3 - Targeting and ship health view
- 4 - Modules and fire groups view
If you press the corresponding key for the cockpit section you're currently viewing, it will take you back to the default/straight ahead view. While on a subsystem view with multiple tabs, you can press Q and E to navigate between the tabs, Space to make a section, and W, A, S and D to navigate the menus (up, down, left and right, respectively).
The cockpit of the ship in alpha build 1 is made up of four sections;
Straight ahead view/main window
This is the default view and shows you directly in front of the ship... pretty much used for flying but there are a variety of control bindings available to target ships and cycle through targets etc. You'll be using this view in general when flying the ship. You do have an overview of several important systems in this view;
From left to right, you can see the following;
- Current system name and location (I'm in the Zelada 2 Asteroid Belt in the Zelada system)
- Visualisation of your target including health and shield strength (currently targeting a planet)
- Radar containing all active targets using white for objects, red for enemies, yellow for neutrals
- Visualisation of your ship including health and shield strength
- Power distribution (more details below)
- Your ships current signature (lower means it's harder for other ships to detect you)
Your ships signature is a visual representation of how detectable you are in space. Toggling silent flying mode will dramatically reduce your signature at the expense of storing all of the heat generated by your ships systems in the ship. While this reduces your signature, running hot for too long will burn out your ship.
Power distribution is controlled using the arrow keys by default and allows you to assign power to various subsystems presented by a power bar (indicating current power level) with up to four dots below it (indicating current power distribution).
- SYS - System power, controls things like shield recharge speed, also deals with Life Support, Power Distribution and Sensors
- ENG - Engine power, providing more power to the engines will increase your maximum speed
- WEP - Weapon power, allows your weapons to fire longer
- RST - Resets power distribution to 2/2/2
To redistribute power, press LEFT to provide more power to system, UP to provide more power to the engines, RIGHT to provide more power to the weapons, and DOWN to reset to default settings. Since there are up to four blocks per system, it is possible to divert all of the power away from any of the systems to provide more power to the other two. This will not discharge a system if it already has power. For example;
- diverting power from the shields will not make your current shield go away, but it will prevent your shields from fully recharging
- diverting power from the weapons will not prevent you from firing your weapons, but also won't discharge the heat generated by your weapons (causing them to overheat, which will stop them from firing)
- diverting power from the engines will not prevent you from using your engines but will cripple your maximum speed and reduce your manoeuvrability
Navigation and enemy subsystems view
This is the view to the left of the cockpit. This view shows a contact list (list of available targets/objects in space) for the near vicinity/scanner range. Also gives an overview of how much health the targets in the list currently have.
To select a target using the Contacts list, use W and S to move up and down the list, and then press Space to select the target.
Once you've got a target, the subsystem tab will show you information regarding your target's subsystems and their current status.
Targeting and ship health view
This section shows many of the cockpit sections visible when looking straight ahead;
- Visualisation of your target including health and shield strength (currently targeting a planet)
- Radar containing all active targets using white for objects, red for enemies, yellow for neutrals
- Visualisation of your ship including health and shield strength
Visualisation of both you and your target is shown as multiple blue circles around your ship showing your current shield straight, and a "HULL" indicator below the ship visualisation showing the current state of your hull. Once the shield has been depleted, you get a recharging indicator in its place:
Modules and fire groups view
This is the view to the right of the cockpit. The modules group shows the current health of each of your subsystems and allows you far greater control over the configuration of your power systems. From here you have control over the following;
- Drives (Engines)
- Shield Generation
- Life Support
- An entry for each of your weapons
- Power distribution
- Sensors
Each module can be switched off, or have its priority changed. Changing priorities means that in the event you start running low on power, certain systems will take a priority in terms of power draw over those set at a lower priority.
Again, to change settings on this screen, use W and S to move up and down the list, press Space to toggle the power state of the module, and use A and D to change the priority of a module.
This is especially useful to limit the amount of heat being generated when you fly silent as flying silent prevents heat from being radiated out into space, resulting in your ship overheating. By customising the systems that are on and generating less heat you can fly silent for longer, and thus, fly undetected for longer.
Note: switching off life support in space is a bad idea.
The Fire groups tab allows you to bind your weapons to fire in groups, and also bind weapons to primary fire and secondary fire. This allows you to fire all of your laser beams at once by pressing primary fire, in the instance that you placed all of your laser beams into the primary fire category.
You'll be using W, S, A and D to navigate this screen again, like the others, but Space on this screen toggles between "Not grouped" (off), "Primary group" (yellow square) and "Secondary group" (blue square).
Reds are "hostiles".
If you're friendly with a faction that a ship is hostile to, they can show up red. If a ship is shooting at you, they'll show up red. If you shoot at a ship, they'll change to red (not sure if it's after they shoot back or immediate).
Assuming you're neutral (or better) and "clean" in a system, you can shoot at (and kill) a ship that is "wanted" and you can shoot back at (almost) anybody that fires at you first.
In other words, just because a ship is "hostile", it's not necessarily legal to fire at it. It's just likely to fire at you.
If you shoot at a clean ship, you will immediately get a (small) fine and become wanted (there will be a message about the fine in the upper right info area and a Wanted notification over your Fuel status area). Once you're wanted, it's legal for any ship to fire at you, and illegal for you to shoot back.
Probably what happened is that when you were firing at a wanted ship, one of your shots hit a clean ship, you became wanted, almost everybody became hostile, and you ended up with a large fine for killing a clean ship (or two or three of them?).
When you're in a crowded space, you really need to watch your shots and be careful not to hit any other ships. If you do unintentionally hit a clean ship, don't kill it (that will get a much bigger fine), don't shoot at any other clean ships, and run off to a station to pay off your fine/bounty quickly.
Note that ramming (or accidentally bumping) another ship counts as an attack.
Note that warning shots (firing but not hitting a ship) do not count as an attack.
Personally, I don't care for bounty hunting at nav beacons because they're so crowded and it's easy to accidentally hit a clean ship. I prefer to pick up a few tons of something reasonably expensive (look interesting to pirates with cargo scanners), and go for unidentified signal sources, being interdicted by pirates, or sitting in frame shift with the throttle low scanning ships until I see a wanted one that I can use my frame shift interdictor on. At the signal sources, it's common to find both pirates and a couple system authority ships, and in the other two cases it's likely system authority ships will eventually show up. However, when it's just a couple clean ships instead of a dozen, it's a lot easier to avoid accidentally hitting one.
In an anarchy system, there is no system authority and you can shoot at anybody. If you have a warrant scanner and warrant scan them before killing them, you can often get bounties redeemable in other systems.
If you're in a conflict zone, the rules are different. I think in that case, if you choose a faction (in the functions tab of the system/right panel) the opposing faction shows up red and there won't be any fines. I'm not sure, since the only conflict zone I've visited was one with only a single faction in it.
Best Answer
When tasked to kill a number of Pirates, Bounty Hunters, etc in a specific system scan targets in that system and any that show up as unreadable "Mission Target" in blue text next to the "Wanted" indicator will count towards the mission.
Signal sources tend to be more likely to contain scenarios of the type that contain these targets, so you're more likely to find some if you enter an Unidentified, Weak or Strong source (though still not guaranteed).
However, for most of these the best place to go is the Nav Beacon or Resource Sites (if there are any). Mission targets are far more likely to spawn in those than in open Super Cruise, so you should be able to rack up your kills quicker.
Finally don't take on any missions like "Go to X and kill Y of..." where Y is more than 5-10 or so unless you know system X contains a Compromised Nav Beacon or a High/Hazardous Res Site - doing one of these missions in a quiet safe system will be very time consuming and not very profitable.