The design, style, and audio to this game are nice, but there are quite a few things that bug me and I believe could be easily improved upon.
1) Honestly, why do stars even exist? I never once had not enough stars and eventually just blocked them out of my vision entirely, only looking at the ore cost of an item.
2) Do the gears do anything other than take up cargo space? The game never seems to provide this information.
3) And speaking of cargo space, once full they no longer pick up repair and fuel items, even though those don't take up cargo space, causing me to just restart once my bays were full with new material from that level.
4) The stat speed of "1" is a bit worthless when ship speed can't be modified.
And although it could probably be irritating to some, I found the "shoot the closest target" AI rather interesting. It made ship design a challenge. I also like how the game itself was a challenge and required constant restarts, instead of just breezing on through.
Overall, good work, I enjoyed it. I played it to the end, so that's telling you something :)