Yes the reason for the “black screen” leaving or entering a station is to avoid showing the client building the mesh and textures in the game. If you use external view option within a player made station, there is no transition at all. The scene doesn’t need to change at all.
Lag (latency), Network, and Server Issues are actually 3 separate issues that can cause somewhat similar bad experience, and people often mistake those and call them all lag.
Frame Rate is personal and mostly irrelevant, lower the settings or get a better computer/GPU and you are doing fine. In any case, this cause is extremely easy to confirm or handle, yet often mistaken for lag in when a lot of elements involved or graphic effects, like smoke, debris, or just too many ships. The client requires a certain amount of memory (RAM) for processing visual effects and calculating formulas.
Latency, also known as lag, is the time and delay between client-server requests, usually measured in milliseconds (0.001 second). The quality of the user’s Internet connection as reported by the ping times to the game server: high latency and the player should expect various issues with delays between taking an action and seeing the result on the screen.
The typical latency of an Internet connection also varies depending on its type. Type could consist of any or all of the following; fiber optic, coaxial cable, phone lines (DSL), or satellite (wireless). Even with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) promising high speed fiber optics, they cannot control other ISPs they communicate through to reach the final destination.
Server Load is known as the server “tick rate”. This is the most important factor, and the cause of most network issues. When people activate weapons, or load into instances. For example; the client sends the command to activate a “smart bomb”, the server needs to verify it’s not on cool down, because the server shouldn’t trust client data (this is done to avoid exploits and cheats), then calculate the distance of every ship in a given distance from the user. If the group is in the distance, apply all the effects and the chain of effects (e.g. debuffs, skills, shields) or everything that can be triggered.
This happens per group, per skill, per player, and grows exponentially the more elements there are in that vicinity. This has nothing to do with the network or client computer, it has only to do with the server hardware, code optimization/complexity and input length or iterations. These calculation are done also in ‘frames’, it can’t flow continuous, players send their action, the server calculates changes, sends results to the players about their current state.
As you can see servers are just one of the many issues that affect your performance.
Have fun!