I was doing the first tutorial and I missed some key point in it somewhere - end result was that I was in a state that the ships were locked out from firing at each other. That was fine, I exited the tutorial. When I started up a real game, the lock out was still in effect. I had to exit the whole game and restart before it cleared up.

Very confusing. I spent some time in the real game trying to figure out why I couldn't shoot at anything. You should probably check any special
"features" like this are reset before a new game is started.