Space mining, trading and combat.
It doesn't work correctly in C3, it was written in C2. There was an add-on for the movement, although I managed to fix that, but there's an issue with colours bleeding through that doesn't seem to work correctly in C3, so it's a bit hard to see stuff.
Not sure about the first one. I'd have to get it working correctly first anyway.
For the 2nd question, it'll take a while with your starting red lasers. If you upgrade to better lasers, you can get through them faster. In testing, with 25 white lasers (the max), it pretty much one-shots a station, but I'm not sure if you could reach that amount of money in time.
3 would be an entirely new game. I am considering buying a C3 license because I want to build an online game, similar to this but without the arcadey part (I don't like the arcade action here, I was more interested in the management feature of running a ship, but it all became a bit bogged down with the arcade section).