How do I order an attack on friends?

Basically, having many technology blueprints in a single station is a death warrant. I often need to obliterate friendly bases to get my hands on them.

I want to order my units to start the attack, even if the enemy is friendly (doesn't return fire). Is there some way of doing this? (I always had to open fire manually, shoot until the relation meter drops two stages, and when the enemy started defending himself, the rest of my ships joined the fray.)

You cannot order your ships to attack friends, the only way is to open attack manually. When you give the order in the tactics menu they will always default to following the target if its friendly.