How do I manual target lasers?

Are you running the demo or the full version?

If you're running the full version, it would just be a matter of locking onto an enemy ship when you have "Auto Beams" turned off. You have to make sure its a "red" enemy ship though.

It's the full version.

I am locked on,

I don't know the difference between red or nonred ships. Do you mean that you can only manual target certain enemies?

When you target a ship, the target icon turns red......I think.......

While in zoom-in mode, if you click on the icon that shows where your firing range is, it'll go back to map mode so you can target another ship.
When you do target another ship, it'll go back to zoom-in mode.

I'm sorry -- I'm having an off day, I guess. I didn't realize you had gone into "zoom mode" already.

This means you can see the ship, and you can see the little recetacles pointing at "weapons" and "propulsion" but you can't fire. If you notice in the bottom right hand corner, there's an icon showing your firing arcs that will be either red or brown, depending on the situation. If its red, you can't fire, even though it looks like you should be able to in the zoomed-in "gun camera". You can only shoot when the firing arcs are green.

They will turn green if an enemy is within range, within your firing arc, your beams are not damaged, and you have not recently fired. (If you can't shoot because the enemy isn't in arc or not within range, the arcs will be red. If you've already fired recently, the arcs will be brown and you'll have to wait for them to turn green.)

The most common reasons to have trouble manually firing like this is because the ship is not actually in range yet (even though the gun-camera looks ready to fire).

Once I had trouble firing and couldn't figure out why. It was because the beams were damaged. We had forgotten to raise the shields before going into combat.

Thanks for the help, I figured it out!

I had a similar issue. Despite all indicators pointing to me being able to fire (enemy ship in range, beams charged), nothing would happen when I clicked; the game just made the "lock on" noise. Auto beams were our only option. When I tried replicating the problem on my computer with me running both the server, and a second instance as both helm and weps, I could target and fire fine.

In a related problem, the button to initiate jump was missing during our 4 person game (limiting us to warp drives only), but present during my solo game.

One or two things may have happened then. The enemy has disabled all of your weapons or there is a connection glitch between your server and client. This happened to me a couple of times when playing on a laptop. I would fire maybe once or twice and then the game would even freeze or crash, forcing me to attempt to reconnect.

I don't know about your jump-drive problem, but hopefully I've answered some of your questions......

The situation went something like this:

"Mr. Brassfield, why are we not firing beams?"
"I don't know Captain, we should be able to manual fire. [click] We're within knife-fighting range, [click] and beams are charged, [click] but nothing's happening. [click] Screw it, switching to Auto Beams [click]"
*pew pew*
"Much better Mr. Brassfield"

I was running two instances of the game, the server and my Weps seat, with the server being displayed on a projector connected to my laptop. We had 3 other players, Engie, Sci+Coms, and Helm+Cap'n. We're thinking the problem may have been because the server computer was also running a game instance, but I have a fairly powerful laptop (Asus G73), so resources should be a non-issue. To compound on the mystery, I ran a "solo" game as all the seats to familiarize myself with what my crewmates see (two instances again, server+game, me at all 5 seats), and I had no problem using jump drives or manual beams.

To eliminate variables, next time we play we're going to run the server on a dedicated computer.

Turns out, Artemis absolutely HATES alt+tabbing or any other thing that gets you out of the game.

If you alt+tab or you or your computer do any other action that takes you out of the game, then as you get back in the game you receive an error message, then you can forget about manual fire. It doesn't work after that.
You need to restart your client and connect to the server again to be able to manually fire beams.
See of it as a weapons officer amnesia.
Tried and tested. This works.

This works assuming the fact that you have energy to the beams and are within weapons range. How you you know you're within weapons range? The indicator replacing you mouse while looking through the scope turns green while aiming at a targeted ship.

Hope this helps :)