I dont have the ultimate gaming system but i like to think my rig is fairly good

CPU: AMD Athlon 2800+
RAM: 1 GIG
Drive: 200Gig Raptor WD Drive
Net Connection: Cable (Australian)

We going from some sectors to others i get nice loading times. around a few secs no more then 10. then others it sits there for almost a min just to load. I like the game, but when on a trade mission it does becoming annoying when almost every sector change takes its sweet time. During these times i experiance almost no disk activity and so my question is. does it download data from a server during these times and could that be my problems. It becomes even more annoying when i dont get that bonus for being under 11:20 due to this very reason.

Are you traveling through sectors with a lot of people in them? My guess is that it's just lag - plus being in Austrailia and connecting to their server in the US Midwest makes for a bad latency situation :/

It could be the case i guess. Latency does suck at times i guess, sometimes i notice it increasingly difficult to hit bots.

I'm not sure that being in Australia has that much to do with it. I am playing from
Southern California and am experiencing the same problems. Yesterday I noticed
that there were 265 people in the game before I started playing. Not only did the
loading screens take a LOOONG time, but many other things as well. The screen
that says "Entering Station - Please Wait" now lasts 10-20 seconds when before
there was barely enough time to read it. When killing bots, the target will vanish
and there will be a 3-5 second delay before the explosion is seen/heard. Later in
the day when the player population dropped a bit, some of these problems were
reduced in severity, but for some reason loading screen time did not improve much.

I have had splash screen lockup too and it takes more then 10 sec, I normally have to logoff and relog back on to make it go but then I got killed and not entered the sector it told me I was warping to