stuntpope

I'm playing my first game and the Protective fields ability of my military starbase doesn't seem to confer the appropriate bonus to my ships. I'm wondering if this is a known issue or if I've misunderstood what they're supposed to do.

I just started a game and I have a ship with 0.2 sct range. The manual says that this limits how far I can go from my planets or bases but I have been all over the map with that ship (definitely more than 0.2 sectors outside my teritory). How does this work? I assumed that a sector is one large square (so the first campaign game has 9 sectors). Can anyone explain this?