A transparent x,y,z (100m x 100m x 100m) coordinate system that can be brought up by a key stroke, and a way to mark locations on that system might help. Regrouping, target locations, etc.

It could also be used for in-sector navigation.

I think this deserves some more attention. What other tools can we implement to make group combat less "blind". We need more target information and ways to quickly select targets. More information on position of friends and enemies would be helpful as well. Perhaps the white dot on radar for group mates should fade in and out with distance like normal targets?

I mean, if nothing's been removed from the Lua functionality in the last couple of years, it can be done that way. For instance, if there was a capital ship in the system, it would be trivially easy to write up a program that established coordinates on any other target in the system. Using that as a foundation, any manner of targeting, coordinate, autopilot, or whatever scripts could written.

That is entirely false. The only information you have on the target is the distance. You would need a minimum of four fixed points to establish coordinates (the fourth so you can tell whether it's in the positive or negative hemisphere). In a previous suggestion (here) I requested that, now that ship control is impossible through Lua, we could have relative coordinates for all of our targets. That would allow plugins to be written that could vastly improve the group combat experience. Without something like that, unless the devs write up some awesome group combat visualizer or something like that (which would probably take a lot of time and effort that they could use for other things), there is no way to properly visualize group combat other than by actually looking at the fight, which is clearly not enough.

Capital ships have at least four fixed points.

I was slightly unclear (both in my thinking and in my writing). You need four points to establish the position of YOUR ship at any one time. There is no way to establish the position of other ships, including the way you suggested in the relative position thread (full response there).

I mean. If you wanna' know someone else's coordinates, you could just ask them.

I doubt your opponents, whose positions you're trying to track to know when they're trying to flank you, will message you their coordinates once per second or whatever. :P

Soo... something small (and hopefully easy to implement) that would help a bit is if plugins had more control over what color ships show up as on radar. If you could assign colors arbitrarily you could give pilots a wealth of pertinent information.

A fading white dot has real draw backs.