New to franchise, and boy do I have questions

[UltimateGrr]

Hello everyone! I'm new to X games in general here, and have some questions on some of the higher concept things.

First off, I've got a frigate and a small ship in a wing. The frigate has better travel speeds, so I have the small ship dock on the frigate when we're moving about. Is there any way to set the small ship so that'll undock from the frigate automatically and help defend its mothership, or will I need to work my way through the map screens to get it to launch?

On a general matter, what's the best way to use a Large (and by probable extension XL) ship? I've got my eye on a mining barge to help my resource extraction operations. How would I go about making use of it? It's got an 80 small ship capacity, so does that mean it can hold 80 small ships internally? Do I need dedicated transports for it to shuttle ore to stations for it? In essence, "how do I big ship?"