Starsector is a retro game designed for bab computers. This is why planet's textures are so low resolution, this is why fighters aren't ridiculous in amounts, this is why fights are locked to 300 DP.
I believe when Fractal designed this game, they wanted to make something people in unfortunately less developed regions of this planet to enjoy without having to worry too much about their already decayed equipment experiencing major failures. The crashing of the game is minimal, and across my long playing, I have never had a crash until I started modding the game. And even then, the game would usually not explode unless I did something really stupid.
I would like to express gratitude for the fact that this game was designed with batman computers in mind, as I myself, had a very batman computer for most part of my life, including the one in which I was playing a lot of Starsector.
I believe the non-inclusion of the auto-save feature is simply meant to make loading screens as well as other transitionary states less convoluted. Old video games didn't have autosaves anyway, tbh.
Deus Ex, Fallout 1 and 2, Starcraft 1. I agree that this may be inconvenient, and I feel really bad for your loss. I can especially understand considering travelling and fighting in this game takes ridiculously long amounts of time. Causing most players to mod super fast *** ships, combat acceleration and mod campaign speed.
If I can recommend you to do something to counter-act this issue without affecting the original game's gameplay too much.
Please find these settings...
Spoiler
"minTravelSpeed",
"speedPerBurnLevel"
and change their values to [linked image].
This will significantly shorten the amount of time spent on travelling around the galaxy. But may break the balance of expeditions, etc. But, whatever... These aspects needed to be broken anyway. At least in my limited perception.