zoom control

The V and B keys control zoom, and you can also use Z/X/C keys for preset zoom levels.

i recommend getting a mouse for Sins though as using a touchpad is a million times harder than it needs to be.

been there, tried it, bought the T-Shirt, got a mouse instead.

If you're really devoted, the Razor Naga mouse, in particular, gives you 12 tiny buttons on the left-side of mouse, marketed to the MMO folks, and a utility to map them to keys (defaults 1-0 minus equal keys), that can let you really go nuts with keyboard plus mouse config. Got one recently and have been trying it out on SINS.  Still acclimizing, but it's pretty good for giving 12-15 useable buttons on the mouse (in theorycraft 17 button total, but it's a little tricky for one's grip to truly leverage all 17 fluidly, imho, I always ignore 2.)

I'm still undecided on whether it's really any better than getting your keyboard hand to memorize 2-key combos for the menu to the qwert asdfg mapping, mostly I found that I have the habit of always devolving to mouse clicking the hud interface of the game, so keeping things together on the mouse hand was personally helpful.  I seem to think I'm doing better at various hold position / local area / leave fleet type of commands that way, but is hard to disentangle from basic game familiarity increasing.

Also, I find remapping context zoom to spacebar, and jump to news event to caps lock (i.e. switch them), a hell of a lot easier / more intuitive than the default binding.