Opps.. I totally missed that one in the client. It use to be on the title screen. I moved the buttons around, and I forgot to put it back. I'll make sure it's back in the next version.
Ok, I guess maybe this was not explained very well anywhere. In the very early days of the game we would list each ship individually in the ship listing when you clicked on a ships location in the system. Lee decided to make 5000 probes (no joke, it was before we had decided on the object capping). Well when you opened up that listing it took a bit to display, and it took even longer to scroll. We thought long and hard about what could we do to make it easier for the player to manage.
What we decided is there are 31 ship types. All the ships in each type are the same. So we should you what we refer to as the ship roll up. If you select a probe from the listing the AI will automatically choose the 1st available probe and give it your orders. In reality it doesn't matter which probe does what you tell it to, you just want a probe to do action <x>.
If in the event you have 3 harvesters at a planet, and they are all harvesting, and you try to give a harvester an order, the order will fail because there are no harvesters available to give orders to. We really should see about removing the harvesters from the roll-up listing if they are under AI control. Usually you will have an arrow with a square on the left side of the planet and you can see how many harvs are at a the planet doing things.
The only place the original listing holds true is for fleets. Each fleet is it's own listing, and will list separately. If you click on a fleet you will see the ships in the fleet in the details of the ship. They show up just under the little detail window.
Glad you like it.