I ran this in the browser for about two hours while devving, I don't usually play idle or incremental games but the gameplay is compelling, and I liked checking it every now and then!
The visuals and UI are very nice, neat and polished, especially when zooming in and out.
Progression:
The very beginning of the game is a bit slow-paced. As you mentioned in the discord having manual mining unlocked at first would be good, since the goal of idle games is usually to stop needing to manually click. I never used the click to mine at the point I unlocked it
the midgame progresses too fast. Very quickly, miners, freighters, and maybe void harvesters once unlocked seemed like the only things that matter for income. The traders, pirates and drones get outscaled so fast
the endgame is very slow since there are almost no more asteroids to mine in any sector, and the persistent upgrades like cargo cap and ore value stop matter at some point because their cost is so much higher than the linear increase in value they provide. Engine speed, once fast enough, also doesn't matter. There were some performance lag towards the endgame.
Some of the one-off upgrades are a little odd:
I'm gated off by 100 traders which is weirdly extremely expensive to reach. I've fulfilled the other requirements many times over and I've unlocked everything else so I let it run for an half hour to get enough for 100 traders. The Trade Lobby upgrade itself once unlocked is only $150,000 to purchase which is about what I make in a second, whereas the 100th trader is something like 2 trillion. I think 50 or even fewer traders is a better point. Same for recruiters (100 miners). I didn't attempt the 200 miners/traders for biz school, which gates off a bunch of remaining stuff which I've fulfilled the other requirements for.
bugs
I prestiged once and the option was still there in the new game, I could endlessly keep prestiging
speed bonuses don't apply to my pirates?
I couldn't view the kawaii anime space girls. clicking on the neurofeed? blanks out the entire game for me, on firefox. refreshing fixes it
Looking forward to seeing what you do with the game!