Ygdrad

I was on the beta and my hangar was facing forward.

I bought some trinium tesla fighters which were supposed to have durability in the 70's if I remember right, but after launching them once at high speed, noticing they can't keep up, recalling them and losing one mysteriously in flight, I look at my squad and notice they all have only 1 durability. - After asking a trader where his home/faction HQ was, he gave me coordinates in a rift/area of dead space. I looked around the area in case it was placed outside and couldn't find it.

I guess I'll just create brand new ships and transfer crew over instead from now on. It was basically a smaller unfinished ship physically attached to my bigger ship and everything that was not set for deletion was inter-connected. I don't know why the root block couldn't have moved, but I'll be careful from now on.

That's just plain false. Deleting that first block is the second thing I do on all new ship after placing some other block next to it. It can totally be deleted without losing the ship. This is not what is causing deleting a large ship part to destroy the ship.

How does the root block work? I've deleted the couple starting blocks of a ship multiple times before without losing the ship.

I was planning on recycling my current ship due to shots being able to phase through its large but somewhat thin corner armor plates(consider this another bug) and destroying internals in combat. I created an arm extending out of my old ship and started building a new ship at the end of it and when it had the crew quarters and power to support my old crew I selected the whole of what made up the original design and to my surprise my ship was destroyed and I was sent back to the home sector. I think I know what is causing this. The game seems to consider deleted parts as combat damage until the new design is saved/autosaved and will sometimes even show the missing parts warning icon. My guess is that since parts have more hp than they give the hull, deleting the majority of my ship at once caused it to lose all its hull hp and be destroyed.

Oops, I didn't word that quite right. To my understanding head hunters show up if you're near a hostile faction, and having enemies is a mostly unavoidable result of piracy and stealing cargo. This is fine, the headhunters potentially ruining the ability to sell/unbrand stolen goods by harming your reputation with smugglers is the issue.

I've had headhunters from a faction I'm pirating show up while I'm at my local friendly smuggler's hideout. Problem is that if I take out these head hunters, I lose reputation with the smugglers. This is a problem since head hunters come with smuggling. Is this working as intended?

You can always run using the hyperdrive though. As long as the jammers aren't fast you'll always have the option. The issue is that the lack of enemy speed makes the game lose any feeling of challenge once you start noticing it. All other factors are already stacked in the player's favor, letting some of the enemy ships catch up wouldn't really scare people away while the game feeling unchallenging definitely can. It's true that most 4x games will have the ability to run from everything, but this usually comes in the form of warping/jumping away, most games will have some enemies that can match the player's speed. High range weapons and kiting shouldn't turn all difficulties into a joke. Maybe tying enemy speed to difficulty could be an option?

I love the game, but one of my biggest gripes with it which also threatens its longevity is that enemy ships are almost never a real threat. I never feel at risk, I know that at any time I can just boost away and that enemy ships will never get close to me if I don't want them to. Some of the ships should be generated with high speeds or be given something to slow the player down. As things stand right now speed lets you control any fight and escape any potentially bad situations. We need enemy interceptors :P

Except you can't. Looked at the keybinds again and there are no strafing keys in keyboard more and no turning keys in mouse mode. Not sure how you're managing to get access to both. If you really can, mind telling me how toy managed it? To be clear, I'm talking about having access to all strafing and turning keys at once.

I know that for a lot of people, controlling both strafing and rotation on keyboard while aiming turrets with mouse is note very feasible, but for some it is. I don't know why strafing controls aren't at the very least available for keyboard control mode so we can retain full maneuverability. It should at least be an option. Better still, make both strafing and rotation keys available on both control modes, let people decide how to set the extra keys up.