At first I figured it was targetless at first but even the U player list was showing blank and i had to hope the people flew behind the fighter long enough for me to hit x or b while pointing right at them.

Are you talking about when in a foggy sector?

No

No it's not from fog. This started happening occasionally after the 15k radar limit was added in. I put in a support ticket, but I haven't been able to reliably reproduce it in order to test without plugins.

OK I just tested this on one of the NPC Tridents at the border and this problem definitely does exist without any plugins loaded.

I was riding a convoy trident last night and saw this problem during part of the trip. I boarded at a station sector in Azek and rode it through the first jump, to the wormhole sector. Then I hopped into a turret to shoot at the strike force, but nothing showed up in targetless and the normal sector list. Then, after we jumped through the wormhole into Dau (with me still in the turret), everything went back to normal.

This should be fixed in the next server update.