I've got it. A few comments.

[Major_SNAFU]

Picked it up today, found a quite corner and installed in on my laptop.

Went smoothly. In installed both V and IV just to see how it would all go.

Since I have spent my coin, I will now offer a few initial observations.

1) The box art: The aliens on the cover look like crack-smoking Jawas with anal probes from H*ll.

2) The printed Manual. I wasn't expecting much here. Content is okay. The Font makes my eyes water, it was a really bad choice - especially since there is a lack of things like bolding subject headings.

I haven't looked at the pdf manual yet, but I am expecting much better things from it.

I am very glad that as a veteran (of sorts) of SEIV that I am not having to read through that printed manual though - but again it is the font, not the content I am commenting on. Heck, I didn't read that much of the content because it was too hard on the old eyeballs Mk I.

I must be missing something about the ship/unit design interface. I find it really, really, really irritating that I have to release whatever component I am working on to be able to use the mouse to click between deck levels (or any of the other buttons on the right-hand side. This, coupled with the fact that you can only release components from teh mouse when you are over the component list means that to click between decks you have to move the cursor all the way to the left-side of the screen, then all the way to the right-side of the screen, then back all the way to the left-side of the screen to select the component you had in the first place (say armor or engines.).

Please somebody tell me there is a really fast way to do this, hotkeys, anything.

The rest of the interface is growing on me, but this one aspect of it is a real clunker.

Oh, and what happened to the move to top and move to bottom buttons for the construction queues?