Yea, it happens. THey don't dissapear, their icons do. And if you are playing with a fairly dark skybox then you could search for them forever and almost never find them. Well, i've managed to find my caps but that happens rarely.
Yeah, when I zoom out I see nothing, then I spend lots of time trying to find the ships and it is like looking for a needle in the haystack at times. This is especially so if the ships I'm looking for got trashed.
