Since it looks like the dev is very keen on feedback and active on forums, thought I'd provide some thoughts:

Crew Combat:

(Suggestion)
- Heavy Weapons are a bit iffy; I just can't see a 'glancing shot' happening with an autocannon. Either you hit or miss. Also, the weapon capacity makes no sense, considering the larger clips of smaller weapons. This has made rocket launchers seem like the optimal choice since they sport enough distance between targets and the crew member, as melee or shotguns seem to be the way to go with close quarters combat. Of course, there's the different damage types, but insofar the benefit seems negligible to switch between HW types. I would either add further splash or capacity to hit multiple targets (like the flamethrower) to make autocannons a viable combat choice.

Overall, the grazing chance seems highly arbitrary and is one of my biggest grievances with the combat system as it currently stands.

- Poison gas grenade description should make note of the visibility loss; not a major issue, but did come as a bit of a surprise to me.

- It seems windows in 'dungeons' are see-through, yet you cannot see enemies on the opposite side. Don't know if this is due to some spawn mechanics or an oversight, but it does feel a bit jarring especially when I keep walking into ambushes in every room.

- Sometimes enemies seem to load in very slowly into rooms, and this has led me to a few instances in which I've basically been walking out into a room before the enemy spawns in, and I'm swarmed from all sides. Also happened with an enemy with a rocket launcher, who scored a near TPK on my clustered party before I even knew what hit me. Not sure how this could be avoided, but perhaps there's ways to further develop the encounter mechanics and load times?

Bugs (?):

- Several times I've noticed that when I've clicked on an enemy unit while in combat, my troopers have actually started running towards them (or in a few cases, actually further away). I imagine this has something to do with the left click spotting, possibly missing on the 3D model hitboxes, but this has happened even when I've calmly clicked on a target several times in a row, resulting in the loss of that character's APs and turn. Especially bad when the character in question is not a melee character.

------------------

Spacefaring & Ship combat:

(Suggestion)

- A target lock for planned flight would be useful. Sometimes I come across new planets, ships or stations and want to check what they are, but this diverts me from my previous course, and I need to look up my original destination from the left-hand menu again. Being able to check other scanner blips while en route would be very useful.

- Not sure if this is improved with better scanners and such, but currently it seems ship info is virtually minimal. Aside the occasional skull or ship type denomination, you have no idea how well equipped each encounter is, and you can quickly become outgunned by a hostile ship, prompting reloading and seeking another route.

- Being able to locate your drones via the system search function would also be helpful. I actually spent five minutes seeking a system I had placed my original drone in, before spotting the little icon on the galaxy map. Also, dumping drone produce would be helpful, as I was unaware of the limitations imposed by my ship's storage, so it's either all or nothing, meaning that I'll need to actually find a ship with a lot more cargo space before I can enjoy the fruits of my drone's labours.

Character menus and UI:

- Seems like the voice selector is a bit iffy; I've tried changing the voice of a female party member a few times without success. A selector indicating voice set number would be useful?

Bugs(?):

- Once during gameplay, my character chosen perks were wiped and I had to reset them for all four characters. Not sure what was the cause, but hasn't happened since.

Other notes:

- I know that the loot and reward system is very random, but having some inkling of what you're being paid before accepting a job would be nice.

- Love the character and item slot art.

- Hacking minigame is nice, but can be utterly broken if you just mash the keypad on your keyboard, as wrong input does not terminate hacking.

- Androids seem to bleed and explode in gibs. I'm not sure if this is intentional?

- The crafting system is very user-friendly, but I wish there were more insights into this feature. Roughly twenty hours in, I've learned several blueprints from my random dungeon delving and scrapping, but I find it odd nobody actually sells refined materials to build new things. Or am I missing something?

- It might be me, but I can't seem to find any recruits with ship or utility skills, just combat skills. So getting more than five crew members seems pointless.

Final words:

The game has great promise, and I've already enjoyed my first twenty hours or so. I may be a bit jaded and skeptic after several failed Kickstarters and such, but this is definitely a game I'm hoping will make the 1.0 mark and beyond. I hope that as I get further into the game, I'll uncover even more fun and interesting features, as I feel that I've only just scratched the surface, promising many more hours of satisfying gameplay. Keep up the great work!

I am just around the 20 hours mark as well.

Mostly ground combat, still getting used to the flying aspects of this game.

Agreed on what you have mentioned.

In terms of performance, how long does it take to load a level for you?

It seems to takes about a minute for me to load a level. Or get into a ship.

And am running this game in Windows mode, at high graphics settings on a Lenovo Legion 7 laptop - AMD 5900HX, RTX 3080 GPU, 32GB ram, nvme drive. Windows 10. Considering this is as high as laptops go (and probably faster then most current desktops), am curious as to is this common in this game or there is some weirdness going on on my end.

Once loaded, things tend to be generally smooth.

Given the game is in development, performance isn't likely to be a priority until all the features are added and bugs fixed. However I'm seeing a 20-30 second transition time on a lower-spec system - SSD RAID-0 drive, Xeon 5650 CPU (overclocked to 4.1 GHz) and an Nvidia 480GTX.

I'm running WinXP and using the 32-bit build, so it may be that that will run/load faster for you.

I don't mind the load times, as long as I know it's not just my system taking extra long. Am aware of quality of development builds, as I am involved in occasional software development as well ;)

Did check my load times and they're about 25 seconds, so it would seem that the game is taking extra time on your system - and aside from the 32/64-bit build differences, I can't see why that should be happening, particularly since the latest build is supposed to improve level load times.Fair enough, but I thought it worth pointing out for those who may have higher expectations. ;)

I am a little late to this party but here goes. Press L (Galaxy map) if I remember correctly and there is a search there that only shows systems you have beacons (Was that what you meant?)

Otherwise there is an icon in the lower left corner where you can see all your mining drones and their status, you can have them automatically sell everything they have (I.e that is your drone dumping.)
You can also see how much cargo each drone has when it is mining. You need to plant beacons (one should have been placed automatically in your starting system so you should see some produce there) in systems then look at the galaxy map and buy from sellers there, they will have seller contracts and you can select how much you buy from that contract, f.e. even though they are selling 1000000 pieces of that product, you can buy all the way down to 1. You should find 4 recruits in almost all stations(first system is different) and non hostile planet bases.
They do have most of the time ship skills, however they do so determined by your teams average level to the best of my knowledge.
Keep looking and you should find some (Higher level systems should help).

My comments after just a little bit (mostly "ground" combat):
- The help texts have writing errors in them ("wants want" or "want wants" in one case), so they may need further passes at some time.
- The Charisma stat seems like it is a dump stat for all but the main character. I think there's a need to make it useful for companions as well.
- The primary/side weapon sets make real world logical sense, but it seems to work poorly in game terms, as anyone equipped with a two handed melee/short range weapon (e.g. shotgun) is left just twiddling their thumbs until the enemy approaches, leaving them behind in the XP race. Two weapon sets that both could be two handed might play better.
- So far I've ignored melee weapons completely (apart from with the initial expended companions), largely due to the previous point, but also because crouching (to increase ranged accuracy) doesn't have a great synergy with the required moving about with melee weapons. I would suggest that an upright stance would provide a dodge bonus against melee attacks (at least ones that are seen, as opposed to back stabs, which may or may not be a thing), or crouched giving a penalty (to the same net effect).
- So far I haven't seen any reason to use companions for any non combat/ship skills: there doesn't seem to be any "resource" limit that forces you to focus, so the only reason I can see (so far) to use companions would be if you somehow managed to recruit one who's outstanding in a skill, but it seems recruits are scaled to the party level, so that ought only to happen if you've dropped significantly behind in some area, and thus haven't had any chance to train the main character.
- There's a mention that the repair skill synergizes with a repair ship station, but when looking at the starting ship there is no such station, so I guess it becomes available on larger ships (or party larger than 4), but it might be useful to mention that this role isn't always available.
- I'm not a fan of the choice to fake return of control to the player when it actually isn't the case. Whenever you save you're quickly returned to the game, but there's a "saving" text, and while it's present any action is ignored. Similarly, when hacking, after failing there's a failure period during which trying to hack again doesn't work.
- I dislike the hacking (frantic button image clicking), and use auto hacking instead. However, it seems manual hacking is completely mouse driven, which is lousy for fast and accurate input. Accepting keyboard input would improve the functionality (I'd still avoid it most of the time, though).
- I've had several cases where I verify that I can fire at an enemy, crouch, and then find that I can't. It would be useful to get feedback that crouching would pull the target out of the line of sight.
- The highlight key ought to be a toggle, or an option to toggle it. It's especially bad that clicking to move while it's pressed doesn't work.
- I'd prefer to have the option to display loot on the "radar" image so I won't have to use the highlight in most cases.
- It's unclear what causes an exploration zone to be "cleared", i.e. marked in green. I've been attacked after zones turning green, and I've found loot I hadn't yet gotten to in such zones as well.
- After my single long duration exploration mission in the dimension hopping station, I fail to see why you'd want to take anything but the short ones. As far as I saw the token reward was thrice the short mission reward for 6 zones vs 2, but then you get some random gear when handing the mission in, and it seemed to be about the same for the long mission as for the short one.

Bugs:
- There's a delay in updating targeting info, so it claims I've got more action points left than I do after attacking an enemy. Annoying, but can be worked around by keeping track of attacks made and checking the updated info.
- A worse case of the above is what the OP reported, i.e. clicking on a targeted enemy gets the next character in line (when the keyboard is used to end the turn) to sometimes run towards the target rather than attack, presumably because the targeting info is obsolete data from the previous character's turn.
- I've run into cases where I haven't been able to target the body of a normal humanoid attacker, only getting the head and the limbs, with the body somehow hidden "below" the head. The targets were at point blank at those times, and it usually works. Stairs may have been a factor, though, as I think the enemies were a little bit down the stairs.
- It seems hacking with a character locked to perform it doesn't work properly. When the party is lead by the shotgun wielder hacking attempts (presumed to be by my main character) typically fails on the first digit, as if the skill used was actually that of the leader, not the hacker who's displayed in the hacking display with a tick mark over it.
- I think the dimension hopping research base missions might be slightly bugged. The one time I took a long mission the two zones first visited were marked as green (the target was killed in the second zone), but none of the others after that, and I find it unlikely that I'd missed stuff in all of those 4 zones (whatever "stuff" is used as the criterion for clearing a zone).

I'm in agreement that melee weapons don't seem to have much of a role to play, given their short range. One approach could be to have special shielding ("Kinetic shield" perhaps?) that's almost completely effective at stopping high-speed bullets/shells/bolts which can only be bypassed by melee weapons (rather like the personal shields used by Go'auld in the Stargate series). You can use the keyboard for hacking - indeed the UI nudges you towards it by copying a numeric keypad. If you don't have one though (a laptop or TKL keyboard), this could certainly make hacking harder.

Some sort of real-time puzzle game (say, where you have to link up similar symbols on a grid within a time limit) might make for a more plausible hacking minigame, but I don't think there's any option here that will please everyone. Agreed - maybe changing the colour of the crouch icon to indicate that it would put you out of sight of your last target? You do get about 3 times the credits (around 100,000) as well as the tokens. Some extra reward for tough missions mightn't be a bad idea though.

Speaking of movement, I would like to see an expansion of the "click on map" function (which is currently limited to level transition doors) to include anything marked on the map (merchants, NPCs, crafting stations, etc).

Also the lighting model in ground exploration is, well, strange. Shadows are drawn based on the moving PC being the only light source, rather than using environment light sources. Unless an area is dark (requiring PCs to use their own illumination), this shouldn't be the case. It would also be nice to have anti-aliasing as a graphics option added at some point.

Yes, it seems the num pad works with hacking, but for most people that's on the mouse hand side, not the keyboard hand side...

Two non reproducible bugs (and so in the "it's been reported before" category if reported again):
- In the dimension hopping research station, my party tried to enter a room where I'd just defeated some enemies. For some reason the fourth party member decided it was a better idea to confront the mission boss alone instead. I assume the logic somehow decided that the other party members blocked the path (in party move mode!), and so decided to go around. I've had cases before where one character somehow lagged behind considerably (again in party move mode). In the conflict the boss and one henchman refused to leave his room, while two henchmen somehow found it would be good to leave the room through the back door (away from the door my lone party member had entered and then retreated, and also away from the slightly down, a lot to the left direction of the rest of the party). By "boss", I mean the mission was a kill leader mission, so the boss was marked with a skull.
- After leaving the research station through the door/portal (not using the TP device), my party, lead by the PC received the rewards. After recycling the junk received I realized the PC was actually rooted outside the portal (with a '^' formation of 3 facing the quest giver, with someone else in the head position). I found I couldn't move the PC in either party or single mode. I saved in a new slot (in case it was fatal), reloaded that save, and found movement to be back to normal (and so easily overcome, but also nothing to investigate).