After the recent change in station aiming method, some players were complaining about their broken aiming tools. In this topic I'll try to explain how to migrate on new method, in Q&A format.

Q: Why not just let us use the old method?
A: Interface issues. There are already up to two buttons for direction, cramming back that third one is deemed unnecessary. Some kind of auto-save without a button isn't going to work, since there are three fields and if it auto-saves before the player finished filling all three, it will mess up values that player had already entered (since direction vector is automatically normalized by the server).

Q: How to move my station out of vision range? I could aim at planet and change signs for direction components to fly away from it, but this is not possible now.
A: In new aiming method, you need a point that's calculated like this: k·M, where M is your station coordinates, and k is a number greater than 1. An easy way to find such point is to take k=10: this means you can take your station's coordinates, paste them into the new form, add 0 to each component and press “aim”.
Compared to old method, this should be easier, since no calculations or manual aiming are required.

Q: I'm about to get rammed, how do I set direction to fly away from enemy?
A: Same principle as above, but instead of (0:0:0) point you should use coordinates of enemy station. The general rule for the point you need is M+k·(M-N), where M is your station coordinates, N is enemy station coordinates, and k is a number greater than 0. An easy way is to take k=1, so coordinates vector becomes 2·M-N.
Compared to old method, this one has simpler calculations, which can even be done without tools if you can sacrifice some precision.

Q: My [supersecret move, which I don't want to share publicly] is broken now, how do I fix it?
A: For now, all calculations I've seen yielded some point in local coordinates, which was then used to calculate direction vector. So you can just drop that last stage and use the point you were calculating earlier directly. If you have some use case, where direction is somehow calculated without that, please share (maybe in PM), I'm very curious.