I had a good modded playthrough with lots of 0.95a mods along with this one. I'll leave a mini-review here to make sure the author knows there are players who care and maybe some feedback.
First of all, the art is hands down amazing. Not only the best art in the entire starsector modding community, it might be better art than what vanilla starsector has. Holy sweet little baby jesus, gotta love it.
Compared to tahlan shipworks, this mod's ships are a little bit more generic mechanically, I wish they had more special/unusual/interesting stuff going on with subsystems or skills. But I don't know how to do that without making them too strong.
Another thing I wish this mod had is tighter integration with the game: give pirates torn apart variants of scalar ships, have maybe some random deep space encounters with their experimental tech, have some interesting interaction with vanilla factions, etc. I understand that the point of this mod is being just a faction mod and this is what faction mods often do, but I know the author can go so much deeper than this after playing tahlan shipworks!
As for weapons, I think their weapons are a little bit too strong for how easy they are to obtain (just land on their planet and buy). I don't mind them being stronger, but I wish they were harder to obtain.
Gotta re-iterate how amazing the art, because it really sells the entire mod. I really like how pixel-art smoothly blends with conventional art in its ships, what a great job with that!