Dumb luck or is this a normal starting strategy?

[PPPPPP42]

My starting sector has at least three derelict space stations (so far out of like 50 stations) two of which are that giant Gothic castle looking one. On the front of that station is a massive "turret" shaped like a gun that makes a damn good ship even as is (with issues).
So right after starting the game I made a 3 block ship (core, power, thruster) and flew from station to station, leaving if it was pirate until I found the first abandoned castle station.
On discovering that I could undock and use the front turret as a ship without changing its derelict status I flew it to a nearby pirate station and proceeded to cut the station almost in half. That summoned a ton of annoying little pirate fighters which took longer to get into the cross-hairs than to shoot to pieces. Most of the time my shields stayed at full recharge (after power upgrade at least).
After harvesting everything from all their ships and loading the "turret" with engines and power thingies so that it can shoot for longer than one second and actually maneuver I basically have a free ship that so far can swat any pirates like flies. It even still has a ton of leftover interior for more defensive and power stuff since another super large player ship would probably chew it to pieces.

Its still stuck on derelict even when I cheated to give myself the cash to "fix" it since the repair space station option doesn't seem to work right on it (anyone know how to fix?), but that means I can only add or delete blocks, not reclaim them. My biggest hassle so far is storage, I don't even bother to salvage things anymore since I am drowning in blocks and random crap of almost every type.
I even added a faction module to it so it shows green even though its still derelict.

 

[Lidren]

Looks like a good play to me. have not ever seen it done before. A little tricky to manage, so good on you for doing so. I think the main body of the station has to be claimed, so the turret is likely bugged.

 

[Malacodor]

So right after starting the game I made a 3 block ship (core, power, thruster)

You can reduce that to just one block, cores have a built in thruster.

 

[PPPPPP42]

Just the ship core block alone handles like a drunken monkey is at the helm. When I added the power and the engine it was able to change direction really fast which was somewhat helpful for not dying while flying up to every hostile base in the world until I found abandoned ones.

In the end I realized that this is like the Minecraft alpha where you will end up throwing the whole world away and starting fresh due to the massive number of nifty new things that will get added and that's when I gifted myself the 1.3 billion it took to restore the station to see if it would fix the turret but it doesn't, nor does using the fix station command on the turret itself though it gives you a price and lets you do it, nothing happens. I think it is indeed a glitch in that particular station setup.

The game really does need derelict ships and a way to restore them and not just utterly uselessly designed and overpriced stations. Another suggestion would be to have stations truly derelict until repaired an not fully functional and near invincible even before repair. The only thing repairing that castle did was allowing me to salvage and re-purpose the blocks instead of just adding and deleting (same as the turret ship).

That castle is pretty nifty though its got enough shields and power that its pretty well impervious to normal fire and the turrets can continuously shoot when attached. I think its something like 1.5 million blocks, most of which are grey advanced armor almost comically thick. I cut off just one of the empty decorative side wings using that 10x10x10 salvage mode in the build thing and have like 60k grey advanced armor now that I will spread over the main body after I cut the other one off (they block the four side gun turrets full range of fire too).

Basically I broke the game when I first took off in the turret I think even before i cheated and fixed the station because mining and crafting more than one or two special blocks became pointless to me with the comical amount of salvage parts I was getting.
Technically any docked turret in an abandoned base could make a starter ship but that particular one is so big with such huge guns and heavy shields that none of the pirate fighters are even a threat even in groups of 6 or more and often not even with a station to help them (shields sometimes slowly creep down).

I'm just screwing around learning the game now until it hits beta.

One big issue I had early on when trying to find stations was that with the uselessly slow max speed of 75 many of the stations would already be gone when I got to the coordinates I set as a way-point on the map. I am guessing due to them orbiting the star or something. That problem doesn't seem to effect my first castle station i found, as its always in the same spot on the edge of the map as are many other stations and shops.
Now I just use admin warp to check stations out since I am too lazy to putz around at 75 or chase moving targets. Eventually I will stop being lazy and watch all the videos and advanced tutorials.

 

[Malacodor]

Add an overdrive computer and an overdrive effect block. When activated your max speed is doubled.

 

[Keptick]

Try using jump drives, it'll cut travel time by a LOT.

 

[PPPPPP42]

The problem was that early on I couldn't build overdrives or jump drives without building a lot of stuff I didn't need first so those help later but don't speed up the initial process.

I have verified this starting method on a newly generated world though, within 1/2 hour I had found many pirate stations but had found a delta derelict and alpha derelict and then found my Eta derelict (the castle one) and was back flying my super turret without any cheating and was smashing up pirates and harvesting fighter craft and turret parts at ridiculous levels.

The stations can be identified from the 4.0 range on the map where the pirate station is still just taking wild potshots at you so its actually quite safe. Use the core/power/thruster combo, gives you instant direction changes at full speed which is critical for evasion and for convenience too.

I love shortcuts but you almost need to pull this station from the game (or make derelict stuff truly dead) as its quite thoroughly broken it. The other derelict stations are mostly basically useless fluff (though cool and pretty) that are only really good for chopping into scrap.