Without any further info, I interpret orbital burns as being an exposure to radiation, in that sense. Maybe limits growing of food, stifled immigration, hard population limit, something along those lines.
Nope! That one's near impossible to guess, though. And is also very cool.
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Say I'd really need a lot of supplies, either for my fleet or for a client. To drive down the price I would have to interrupt Jangala's supply export to main supply buyer X, so local stockpiles increase (become green) and the price drops, right? My options to do that are what? Intercepting outgoing fleets with destination X? Arrange for X to get their supplies from another source? Blockade X? Would any of this generate an event?
Or, say I found a good trade source to buy food from. Can I just intercept the incoming fleet from Tartessus and drive the price up that way?
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It strikes me that to do a lot of these things the player is going to need a better way of interacting with the universe than just combat. Then again the framework for that is already in place with the dialog system - there just needs to be a whole lot of content made for it.
Yeah, that's very much the case. For example, the way to drive prices down would be a blockade, but what does that mean in game terms, and would the planet even trade with you, perpetrator of said blockade, after that? (Interrupting trade lanes to a consumer might not make a difference; other consumers would pick up the slack unless that consumer was the only big one). I don't have a detailed answer at the moment, but am very much thinking about this in the same terms - i.e., how exactly can the player interact with this?
There are many ways to go with that, and I think the system itself is amenable to such interaction; it's a question of nailing down the specifics. The other part is providing the player with the necessary information to act; that's what I was getting at when talking about the commodity detail panel not necessarily being final.
Oh, and I noticed that there a breaks in both the symbol rows for hand weapons and crew. What's that about, used vs. stockpiled resource?
"Local supply/stockpiles used locally" vs "excess local supply/stockpiles".
And maybe, instead of "buy price"/"sell price", you could write "You sell for"/"You buy for". As it is now, its ambiguous who the seller or buyer is in each case. Not that it's hard to guess what is meant, but I find myself pausing after reading it.
Where do you mean? I don't see that on either of the two screenshots in the post. Or do you mean in the tooltip? There, it's the credits you get/pay for moving the item to the other side of the trade screen; that *seems* fairly clear. Adding the "You" somehow sounds odd to my ear.
Can't wait. Is that non-Hegemony flag a Sindrian flag? Or does it just mean "neutral"?
Placeholder - it's actually the flag of an entirely different faction, which for now is just used everywhere where there isn't a finished faction flag.
The Coalition? 
Sort of, but with a different name. Still, chalk up another good guess for you.
I am personally against an 'unfolding UI' that is unlocked by skills because I am worried that it would create a 'I have to grind until I can play how I want' scenario. I also enjoy figuring out how systems like this work on my own and am annoyed when I think the game is 'babying' me, but I may be a bit odd in that respect.
Yeah, that's definitely a concern.
That said, the Navigation skill does this already. Player does not have Navigation 7, he cannot use stars as portals. I would not be surprised if more skills featured similar unlocks.
I think there's a qualitative difference between that, and locking away parts of the core UI. "Adding different ways of interacting with a thing where you already expect to see a set of options for interacting with it, and probably don't expect it to be a fixed set" vs "locking away parts of a clearly pre-designed UI". I feel like I'm not articulating this very well.
