Technically I have 2 questions.

#1 Is it possible to have a ship left overnight without getting it repoed? I've started to build my empire and placed my home planet in a nice dark dead end sector far from the shipping lanes. I've got moderate defenses, but wanted to add the extra measure of protection by having an interdiction cruiser parked in my sector. Is there a way to do that?

#2 Do you need any special software in order to play locally on several computers? Myself and afew friends that used to play TW on BBS want to have a marathon lan game. The idea was to hook all of the computers up via hub and all play at the same time. Is that possible?

1) Yea, you can have extra ships in your sector without them being towed. If you want to make use of the IC ship, you'll have to be sitting in it all night.

2) Only if the sysop has turned off duplicate IPs. All your machines on a LAN will have their local IPs NAT'd, and their outside IP the same. To the sysop's game, it'll look like all of your boxes have the same IP.

Problem with the IC is you have to be on line for the IG to work, if your off line it doesnt work.
You could hook all the the machines up and run "basicly" a local game. One machine would have to host the TWGS, which you could play from as well, the other machines would have to connect to it via the network, which is as close to local as you can get except for playing on the machine the TWGS is on. Good luck with it.

You only have to be IN the IDC with the IG turned on for it to work, if you drop connect it's still on ( Photons turn it off )

However...if you have sector figs an invader can RETREAT from a ship IG NOT a Planet

This happened to me, a corpmate went mega-blue and the CEO dropped him off the corp to avoid big exp losses. I entered a sector his ship was with him in it and his IG was on. I could not move out of the sector. I just transported out of my ship and avoided that sector. Then later someone else blew up his ship and I got my ship back, it was full of figs so they couldn't blow it up or capture it. He was a few sectors from the stardock in a slow paced game.

Aliens are different, they can escape the IG beam of a ship, I've had it happen to me many times. I was trying to cap aliens in an IG ship so they wouldn't move, and they kept getting out of the sector. It was Alien Traders in an EPCOH game, I had no sector figs or planets from them to retreat from in those sectors. Sometimes the beam would hold them, but some of the time they slipped out of it. Weird.