You were probably in the sundisk space, explore mode tends to start you solidly inside of a controlled zone. They're not the dedicated enemy, but they do make for painful fight sometimes because they don't suffocate.
The IOU is a weapon because everything is coded as a weapon, the weapon behavior is together with the ability to be an inventory item because I started with just weapons, you can equip it, but it's just a joke to be able to do it.
The gibberish says 'jump', but it's supremely confusing.
The getting stuck is caused by running out of fuel, there's a little purple bar under the jump button that indicates how much you have, but when you run out you need to fight ships until you get some fuel as loot, it's often a death sentence, and it's why the stores all sell fuel.
Your guns should probably stop, but 'h' is the hold fire button and works inside of events.
>made it to lvl 40
I'd be interested to know what setup you ended with.
Thanks for playing and the detailed feedback.
I didn't save the Ship, but I just maxed out shields as fast as possible to avoid Damage, then maxed Weapons.
Sold my Drones and rockets etc. and ended up with I don't know how many Crewman of what Race scattered everywhere, with a triplelaser, basiclaser, some hotgun or something ( a big purle laserbeam I think), and a healing shield Weapon. No extra Slots or anything, on Pomaos Ship v2.