This is a noobish question, can someone type to me how do I save in Independence 2?

How far are you? You have to dock back at your station to save the game.

Yep. It autosaves when you launch, but you can also save to a specific game file at any time while you're dinking around in the base. There is no save feature as you're flying around.

You can save mid-mission by going back to base during a mission, but it isn't recommended, as it can cause mission bugs in some circumstances.

The saving system is one of my biggest regrets about the game, especially as we successfully implemented in-mission save-points in the I-War Deluxe Defiance campaign (though they required a lot of work to get right.)

I dunno. It adds a bit of tension instead of being able to save before every combat. However, there are a few long missions near the end of the game where an auto-save would have been nice.

The biggest issue for me was the travelling you had to do to re-start a mission. If on mission failure you had simply restarted at the mission start location rather than back at base, that would have been a big improvement.

One idea I had was that you could save at any friendly space station by docking with it, but unfortunately it was never implemented. The missions weren't really designed from the ground-up to be saved mid-mission anyway, which was the biggest issue. A decent saving system would have to have been designed and implemented fairly early in development to ensure that all the missions used it properly.

To be honest I was against mission checkpoints in Defiance originally, for exactly the reason you suggest - it added to the tension and meant there were consequences for failure. However once they went in I realised how much better they made the game. It was still hard, but at least you didn't have to repeat 40 minutes of gameplay because you failed in the last 5 minutes of the mission.