Played an hour or two of Starlost. It's a bit grindy, but I'm slowly getting a few of the quality of life features installed on my ship (tractor drone, and soon a mining drone too. Will get some more combat ones later). A few rockets, a few railguns, some ion beams and a plasma caster or two and I'm pretty happy with my ship combat-wise. Rarely ever do the charge-and-shotgun thing any more, so it feels like I'm fighting properly, not just jousting enemy swarms. Only up to sector 4, but I wanted to grind a bit to try out some different weapons and upgrades. Battles are pretty easy so far.
Hoping that the Alternator actually does charge my energy at a decent rate, because that's as much of a limiting factor as my cargo capacity for now. Will edit post to say if it's any good.
Turns out you can just use a bottom-left thumbstick control, so it feels way less weird to control with that enabled.
Protip: putting one of your ion beams onto weapon control grouping and then hitting that button once the others are on cooldown gives you a far longer beam time. Sure, it splits your damage up, but since you waste most of it anyway, splitting them up works well. Their cooldowns cycle from that point, so it's a one button press per battle thing, so it's easy enough. I tend to throw a plasma caster or two on that as well, because their AoE is only good vs groups, so why waste energy until they're clumped up a bit better?