So, is auto-resolve completely gone now?
Yeah.
So, what happens if I hit escape during a battle? Is there a way to shut down the game during a fight?
In hardcore mode, it asks you if you want to exit the game. In normal mode, it asks if you want to go back to the main menu. (The logic there is that in hardcore mode, you could "cheat" by exiting out from a battle only to reload the save, but you can already do that by killing the game from task manager. So, the game isn't going to try to fight that somehow, but will just rather let you exit mid-battle, since you may want to do that for other RL reasons - but in a way that discourages the aforementioned cheating.)
As far as the Sensor Array change: my feeling is that with a 25% range boost (50% for two!) it became a qualitative change in some cases. +10/20% damage is just universally good, but it's not going to change the way you play a ship, which I don't feel objectives should do.
There's an argument to be made here that Nav Buoys change how some capital ships play, but to that I say, one step at a time
Really, even after all this talk, it's possible that .6 could be balanced perfectly, and I'm just whinning uselessly. I just like winning at things I do, is that so bad?
It's perfectly normal! Possibly also bad. Ahem.
I'm not sure I need to go into how exploitable the pre-0.6a boarding mechanics are again. About supplies costing 20x more, though: I don't think that's nearly as drastic as it sounds, just because the current cost is so laughably small.
A bit of perspective - I seriously doubt 0.6a is going to be perfectly balanced, and am not even going to aim for that until all the core features are in
If some releases end up suffering a bit because features need to lean on other features that don't exist yet in order to work well, well... that's really just the breaks. As usual, I'll try to keep things playable and do what I can, but that only works to a point.