Question: How are you going to stop hidden game overs of someone running out of fuel and falling into an empty system?
Not sure yet. There are a few options, from "let them learn from painful experience" to "give more fuel for scuttling ships" to "distress calls" to "opportunists showing up offering to sell you fuel(looking at you, Mael-Num)" to, well, other things.
I'm a bit iffy about the menus too.
Spoiler
Since Key modifers are already a big thing as part of the game how about this for the menu system:
1. Right-click for menu
2. Left click for default action
3. Shift click for other likely action
4. Control click for special action
5. Alt click available for player customization (or mod customization)
If right click brings up a menu (without any of the current delay that will get aggravating rather quickly)
Left click is move to
And shift click is info
Right-click is used for dragging, although that's not insurmountable (e.g.: the combat map, which uses it to drag and to give orders). But there's really nothing that makes putting the menu on right-click necessary to your suggestion, though, is it? Basically, you're saying "add control and shift click as shortcuts for some of the options"; moving the menu to right-click seems tangential to that. Which, I mean, it's not bad, but also doesn't seem necessary.
The map UI looks fascinating and beautiful. I almost want to play it on a giant touchscreen, so I can, well, touch it and feel like a real space ship navigator 
Ha
Thank you!
Map and the normal action screen are strictly exclusive, aren't they? I'd love to have the map open on a second monitor.
Yeah, afraid so. Especially since the non-current-locations (which you can now view the map of!) run at a lower frame rate, meaning the movement of planets etc on their map looks jerky.
Alex, you probably can't talk about the "age of constellations" mechanic without spoiling it, can you?
My guess would be that it determines what kind of things you'll encounter in those regions. Maybe old constellations contain things like Domain survey fleet wreckages and ruins of big colonies, or even pre-Domain alien ruins and artifacts. While younger constellations might have more commercial wreckage and smaller but only recently abandoned ruins.
But we don't know what "old" and "young" relates to, so maybe "old" is everything pre-Domain.
Actually, it's not super meaningful right now - the age is in a "galactic" sense, i.e. a young constellation is more likely to have blue stars, be inside a nebula, have more lava worlds, ring systems, etc, and more stuff overall. Older constellations are more likely to have fewer objects, dimmer stars, and habitable worlds. But since outposts (unfortunately) won't be a thing for this release, it doesn't mean too much.
I'm not sure "picking the Sector age" will remain as a new game option going forward - might get replaced with something stronger, perhaps like what you're talking about. More ruins from one age vs another, etc. Naturally, the concept of constellation age would remain in any case, since it's a core part of how they're generated.
Otherwise, that's a very cool update, the sector is going to be huge now. Even with sustained burn, travelling to another constellation will take a while. I'm a bit worried the game will feel quite empty though.
Yeah, keeping an eye on that myself. Might end up downscaling it a bit if it's needed for gameplay, but we'll see. Traveling to a nearby constellation really isn't too time-consuming, but going all the way to the outskirts does take a while. But that's also nice, in a way. You really get a feeling of scale, so as long as there's a good reason to go there, and perhaps a few distractions along the way...
Now that the sector is huge, will the number of events increase as well? (Bounties, investigations, etc.)
Since the stuff around the core is mostly ruins to be explored, they're not going to factor into events very much. Bounties, perhaps - i.e. a few more places for the ne'er-do-wells to hide - though hopefully not on the very outskirts.
Same thing about the player's reputation, will your buccaneering exploits be immediately renowned in the entire sector? Or just in the local area? Logically, i'd say the "accident" you caused in "Zeta Yomi C" would probably never reach the Hegemony high command's ears, being buried under the paper piles of the Chicomoztocian's bureaucracy and all that. Unless you did stuffs, like, borrowed a whole Onslaught from the local garrison or something.
Haven't quite decided on how that'll work yet. I mean, yeah, if you have a "dispute" with another salvager way out there, it seems like that shouldn't instantly tank your reputation everywhere.
Does this mean that trading and missions will be largely be in the centre of the map, the core worlds, or will there be enough stuff generated outside of it?
Trading (such as it is at the moment), yeah, since it involves population centers. Missions, not necessarily. In fact, the way I'm thinking about it right now, missions would be something that would nudge you towards exploration.
