Developers answer questions on flight balance: capital ship beyond-visual-range locking, cargo hauler speed and escorts, decoupled EVA, and load-based ship agility. They also cover Constellation in Arena Commander, mouse vs. joystick vs. gamepad, and the Xi'An Scout.
Yes. It exists in game as most targets you can lock onto initially are barely a pixel to you. As the ships get bigger, the range in which they can lock on gets bigger. This will also bring game play to ships like the terrapin or similarly equipped to relay targets to the larger ships.
No. The way they want the game play to be for cargo haulers to an extent is like the navy where your bigger ships are slower and vulnerable, but have escorts. So if you wanted to go into a less secure space, you have a risk versus reward and whether or not you want to pay for the extra escorts.
Yes it will happen, the current system doesn't seem very fluid when it comes to aiming and certain situations so it's something being worked on.
They've been basing it off of a capacity that's full or close to it. So performance will be better empty, but they're still tweaking things. They want the end result for ships to still feel weighty.
The reason why they're not in is because they need a way to properly load in people onto the same ship as the Constellation is about mutli-crew gameplay as are other ships, but once multi-crew lobbies are a thing, then it will be in.
With changes to boost and g-force changes, that has given ships the ability to be nimble, but still chase ships. Weapon has played a part in that as well for 2.6.1.
Well neither is better than each other. Joysticks have advantages as do Mice. For aiming, the mouse is better because that's what a mouse is designed for, but HOTAS is generally better at flying. They don't want to gimp one control scheme for another because they want people to only use a certain control scheme.
They're looking into it! They know it's not where they want it to be, but it's a difficult battle to figure how to keep controllers aligned with the other inputs. It's possible there might be a separate control scheme, but they're working on making a solid default setup first.
For racing maybe a slightly higher SCM speed, but it's agility it's quite good and where they want it. They know there's an issue with weapons in it and the targeting makes it difficult to hit, but they'll resolve that. Also with racing the tracks were designed before the Scout came into the game.