Hi I'm new to SOASE (I'm still playing the demo although the game is on its way) and I have a couple of questions I hope you can help me with.

First, I don't get the "automatically get into a fleet" function. It seems that when I have any fleet (s) organized, all ships I construct will automatically go into a fleet. Now supposedly, according to the tutorial produced ships will go into a fleet of the same gravity well, however I see my new ships actually jumping to other planets in order to join some fleet. This is a problem because suppose I build a couple of frigates on planet A to supplement its defense, but they happily jump to planet B where the fleet is stationed. The fleet grows huge but planet A is defenseless.

I would like to have fleets but not have newly produced ships join those fleets. I prefer to organize my ships manually. How can I do this?

Which brings me to my second question: What advantage is there in having ships in a fleet over having them in a CTRL-x group? I have to resorted to the latter while I figure out the fleet thing.

Third: Is there a way to change the background color? Or actually turn it off! I mean the color space looks when you are zoomed in.  While light blue is tolerable, I find red and green irritating to the eyes. When I zoom out and space turns black it feels so refreshing.