I guess what I'm thinking of is a "Zoom to sector" type button. It would display the selected sector with much finer grid system. I suppose this has certain implications, such as "in sector jumping". Is there any reason why you can't jump to specific points in space?

A hud coordinate display would be cool too. That way when I find something interesting, such as an asteroid with 90% heliocene I'll be able to pin-point it's location in space, and return to that exact location at a later time (provided I took note of the location)

I'm not a big fan of the idea for in-sector jumping. The way I see it, jumps accelerate you to such a massive speed, that there's a "minimum" distance they travel, which minimum is greater than the distance through a single sector. As for selecting specific points to exit from a jump, I actually don't care one way or the other, but it's less work for the devs to keep it the way it is now. Currently, jump exit areas are determined by the where you start & end your jump - all jumps from sector A to sector B should exit in approximately the same area. If you want to exit close to the WH in sector B, try jumping to other sectors first, and then to B, until you find a jump that works for you.

WH warps, of course, are different: the exits are random within a 2000m radias of the WH, with ships warping at around the same time placed as far apart as possible. I don't think anything should change here either.

in sector jumping is IMO a bad idea.. the sectors themselves are huge, but the "useful" area of each sector is fairly close to the center, and fairly small.
Being able to choose where you system jump into a sector would make travel pointless.. everyone would warp in next to wormholes and stations, making PvP impossible. Besides, where you warp into a sector at is allready determined by what direction/distance you are coming from. try it sometime, you will find that if you alter where you jump to a certain sector from, where you enter the sector will change.

As far as a coordinate display, we had that in the past and players can use it to create 3rd party auto-pilots, allowing them to totally automate tasks such as trading or mining. start the 3rd party script at a point when almost no-one is playing, in a quiet area of the universe, walk away from computer, return several hours later to a huge stockpile of credits/ore/cargo/etc. Due to this the coordinates were removed.

Everything Spellcast said

It's funny how the idea that I didn't actually propose became the big "no-no". I merely pointed out that in sector jumping would be a possible candidate in the event my suggestion was liked. To tell you the truth, I don't like that idea either, but it didn't stop me from mentioning it. I'm glad others share my opinion.

With all that aside, I would really like to see the addition of a "Zoom to sector" type button with a corresponding interface and finer grid system in display, as I mentioned above.

To Spellcast (and roguelazer, apparently): I suppose that I understand why you wouldn't want a coordinate display on the hud. (Hypothetical questions) How do these players use the coordinate display to create a third party script? Do they read the memory values? Well, I'm sure those still exist (in some form), even without the actual display. The server knows where you are. That means the client should know where you are, and keep track of that information too.

So either way, it would seem (based on what I understand, which, is very little :-P), that a third party autopilot is still somewhat possible. Unless the client/server has a radical way of keeping track of your location.

you are correct, the information is still availible even without the hud display, the 2 types of bots i know of used slightly different methods...

the first, and easiest, used an actual command /displayshippos (display ship position) which echoed a value to the chat display. Everything in the chat display is saved to a text file in the vendetta directory known as errors.log which can then be read by the third party program.
thus the displayshippos command was removed.

the second, less simple, but still viable method invloved using a screencapture program to take a screenshot of vendetta, from which some data can be taken. even if the data was present on the hud in merely text form it can be recognized by some software and converted to a value usable by the script.

the client itself has not, to my knowledge, been succesfully hacked as far as packet data and memory values go. some people have been able to open it up and change some of the on screen text messages, but i dont believe anyone has ever gotten more than that and still had a client that will succesfully interface with the server.

Since the entire engine was written from scratch by the devs they seem to have done a pretty good job of sealing all the holes.