A few questions from a newbie

[primitive]

It's good to be of assistance. Thats somthing that don't happen too often

There are a lot of buttons and options in SEIV, take your time to try them all.
Now that you found the "Combat replay" and can see how your ships suck in battle, it might be time to start experimenting with the strategies (target priorities).

Even with the annoying "move before you shot" thing, fighters rule the sky for a while in the early game. Then they are pretty useless for a while until you can get large stacks of large fighters with some heavy shielding. Those can be used with devastating results in mixed fleets in the late game.

And while you never actually need drones, there are some special cases when drones can be very usefull