Totally, utterly amazing. Even did me the personal favour of hammering Kadur in there. Whee.
Things I did notice:
Memory clogging got worse (no surprise.)
Blueprint drops are insanely rare. I have a level 30 character now and managed to collect a whopping four (4) blueprints. I'm not generally one of the lucky guys but that is quite harsh. Especially as I did manage to take down three Hegemony SDF's with their 3,5 Onlsaughts. (Love trashing these buckets. Take a destroyer, get behind them and enjoy...)
Having no credit rewards increases the potential danger from the boarding troll, as blowing up the "boardable" ship blows up the parts as well. A small credit injection per won combat might be nice.
Having no fuel drops at all poses the risk of getting stranded in a hostile system - forever. Me going to the nomad place to check it out and possibly hunt down some SDFs (They did not have any?) almost had to start a new game before I realized I could not just hunt for fuel wherever I was. Please reconsider this/put up some "automated fuel depots" as the ironclads universe has them.
The faction You chose does not sell their blueprints or faction specific parts. Puts You in the strange situation that You can compose Your fleet of everything Your enemies have, but with Your allies You have to hope for a good season on the shipdealer's at home. I think You should give us an option to either buy the stuff completely, or buy the components and have the blueprints drop from the faction's >enemies< as a reward for good service by Your sponsors.
Blackrock start at Corvus works fine, they are not hostile.
The two Kadur factions seem to always be hostile (rebels) and neutral (main faction) if You do start with some faction not related to them. Should they not all be hostile and just hating each other as well?
The twinstar-system with the Kadur presence does not have a neutral trade hub. That's a pity, hunting there is fun.
Neutral trade hubs seem to have a lot more and better stock now than before. Love it. Only issue - faction stations seem rather dried out now. Both Blackrock bases only sold rather small and basic stuff and ships.
Give me more nomads! I don't feel hunted by the occasional, lone djihad-corso.
Finally, not an issue, but might be interesting - unlike the previous version, when I started the new game a large number of fleets spawned instantly at every visible station and spread from there. In the last version You said You had spread that out as to avoid exploding the workload on some people's poor little computing machines. I think this got lost somewhere on the way.