If you're going for a specific artifact, such as a rescued prisoners, are you more likely to receive it if you do individual pulls, or if you check all?

I think it's always the same chance, but it depends on how many points you have. Your best chance will be when you have less than 5,000 AP (when continuum beacons start being pulled, I believe).

If you get to the point where you can pull all of your points, you're past the best chance to get one. If you have 20k points and do manual pulls or pull all, it should be the same ratio (however it will leave you as close to 0 as it can get, where ideally it would be best to remain as close to 4000 as possible, unless you get over 4000 AP per hour anyway).

I've been trying for MSP's because I only have 100 free cargo atm. With these what would make them easier to get?

You will find the answer to your question in this thread. viewtopic.php?f=4&t=18968&

This sums it up nicely.

I don't believe anything costs more than mass storage pods (20,000), but you'll want to manually pull to stop yourself as close to 20,000 as possible.

The only strange things happened when a player collected over a million AP from a base and collected everything with the box checked. So yeah.

Thanks fluff