Sentry

[Dragonlord]

I ALWAYS use the next ship feature (space bar) it is excellent! Especially when I have 100+ ships, and because I never use any ministers.

The only bug with it I sometimes run into is that it will not always skip to ships which are in orbit of a planet with many other ships, while it should normally go to that ship. (ship has no orders, no sentry). SOmetimes are multiple hits of space bar the computer "wakes up" and finds the ship.
BTW I use Sentry a lot too, e.g. to park a frigate in an empty system as an early-warning scout until I can get some satelites to replace it.

[CW]

The way I do it is to have whole fleets of auxiliary ships following my attack fleets, and they always have big stockpiles of satellites, mines and other spares. No wonder I never seemed to need the sentry command.