I purchased this game quite recently thanks to hearing about it from Scott Manley and there have already been two updates, including a much-needed autoresolve feature for the crew tests.

Game is quite fun with lots of potential, though much work is still required.

I really want to like this game, but it is just missing to much stuff. It is enjoytable laying out the rooms and doing the ratings missions. BUT, that is where the fun ends. And it ends fast, gets old fast.

The gameplay itself isn't the substance of this review, my problem comes with when I wanted to stop playing. Shutting down the program apparently went smoothly but Steam registered the game as still running after it had quit. There were no processes listed under its name, I couldn't shut down Steam itself because it couldn't shut down Starship Corporation. Actually stopping it required a full computer restart. So until that bug gets fixed, I strongly recommended you pass on this game.

Has many issues yet but as a core game its dead on what it should be

Bought this game on summer sale, and frankly, I haven't regretted it. At least not yet, after spending 20 hours with it, researched about a quarter, maybe third of the tech tree, so it seems I can anticipate another 40 hours at least. That's not bad, although several features in the trailer are not yet implemented, or locked in EA. At the same time I think it would only be worth buying at full price when those are available; namely opening offices in other systems than the Solar system and building and complete missions with our own ships.

Currently you will spend the majority of your time with two tasks: designing ships and then nursing them through an evaluation process to see how well/badly your design would work in around 20 or so scenarios including business as usual, playing Millenium Falcon in the middle of the remains of Alderaan and fending off intruders. Let's see what you can expect as of now.

Design: I think it actually approaches this aspect from the wrong direction, since you develop the body of the ship and then try to cram as much stuff into it as you can, instead of designing a functional system and then build the hull around it. I think I see why the devs chose this method, but also it can be a bit frustrating sometimes, when you realize you've put less cooling than needed, and the only space available is at the front of the ship (otherwise known as the place where you don't want to be during a meteor shower), so you can't let the ship leave the shipyard without a shield generator in good conscience, but that way the power provided by the reactors is less than required and you have just not enough place to put down another one. So, the first few of your desings will be redesigned several times until you can fit everything into the limited space even though the medic's quarter doubles as a corridor.... And you know what? It's fun if you don't mind sometimes deleting back the last half an hour work of yours. Thumbs up for being able to save the current desing in case the modifications don't yield the expected results.
A tip from me: research energy/cooling/water/etc. connectors as fast as you can to be able to use one deck's excess power on another, or to be able to place an air tank on an other deck than the one your life support resides on.

Evaluation: Also known as Crew Management in the game. Here you will find a number of scenarios and by completing them your ship accumulates points in Standard Operation, Emergency Response and in I Shoot You In The Face For Setting Foot On My Ship. More points mean your ship is more valuable, and that means you'll get more money for it.
You play here as the invisible and omniscientious captain of the ship, intructing your crew to deal with arising problems like fire raging through the ship or aliens snacking on your hull. You do this in a pausable RTS mode. This part needs some polishing in my opinion, because many of the scenarios are a bit tedious, for example chasing electric malfunctions around the whole ship for ten minutes can grow old quite fast even on the smallest fuselage. But several of them are fun (in a way), or rewarding in a sense that I was quite proud when I first passed the meteor shower scenario with almost no damage thanks to my newly developed shield generators or when I first saw the crew charging in the engine room eliminating those pesky green mf's with their brand new pistols.
A tip from me: Since update 3 you can autoresolve all missions, but I'd recommend using this feature in moderation. Mostly you'll get far better scores by playing them yourself, but in several cases the automatic method can somehow produce points where you may fail. Example: the alien infestation scenario is pretty much unsolvable without firearms in my opinion, but autoresolve will bring you 2 or 3 points there.

The 3rd area you will spend time on: the Market. Currently it looks like it's in only to provide you a cause to desing ships. You'll get an occasionally updating list of contracts and by completing them you'll get money to cover your operation and research costs. Not much to see here (at least not yet), because if you keep researching technologies and bid on contracts you think you can complete/already have a qualifying design, you will not run out of money.
A tip from me: Getting the most points attainable for a desing in the SOP/ERS/HEP ratings (HEP scenarios provide mostly 0 points for ships without weaponry) seems to ensure that your competitors can't outbid you. But, to be honest, I never was outbid except in the tutorial, so there's that.

Finally: Research a.k.a. Technology. Simplest part of the game. You have 3 research stations (in EA; later it may change) and a number of system waiting to be researched and used during design. You click on an idle station, then click on an unresearched piece of engineering marvel, the game tells you how much that will cost, you click OK, and then you wait until it becomes available. You won't be surprised here, the techs mostly provide you an upgraded version of an earlier module which usually takes up more space than before but is more efficient, except in a few cases (engine, computer) where it shrinks while being superior.

Let me say a few words about the game in general. I haven't encountered game breaking bugs or crashes, so thumbs up for that. That doesn't mean it's bug free, but nothing serious so far. (Edit: Just now it crashed during probe attack. Don't forget to save often...)
One thing can happen during design when you pick up an already placed module to put it elsewhere, and it disappears leaving only a 1x1 m size "cursor" behind on the ships deck which you can't do anything with; no selecting, no nothing. Fortunately switching to power/cooling/fuel/etc grid mode and back to module building fixes this.
Another thing that bugs me, that the tutorial mentions at a point that you can lock hatches. Supposedly you'd need to do this when the hull is breached and air is sucked out of the ship. You'd lock the hatch, turn the damaged room off to cut air supply and then your engineers could safely approach the breach to repair. Well, for the life of me I couldn't find the option to actually lock hatches. I can turn them off, but that doesn't lock them.
Another thing with hull breaches that they can be unpredictable. Turning off the damaged and all somewhat adjacent rooms seem to stop the air escaping and thus not sucking your approaching engineer into the cold vacuum of space, but sometimes air somehow finds a way to f**k with you and start leaking again, and the next thing you see is that you have one less guy complaining on payday about bonuses. So, either you switch a buttload of rooms off and then on when the hull is repaired, which is just as tedious as you think, or you simply switch life support off, instantly stopping the airflow. Just don't forget to turn it back on when you hear your men gasping for air.

Aaaaaand... that's all. For now. I eagerly await the promised "explore the galaxy with ships you built" feature, expecting the scenarios in Crew Management and more, but randomly occuring. Until then I have to make with repairing simulated hull breaches caused by simulated asteroids.

Ok, let's say the truth: the game is still in Early Access.
It was, until the last update, also bugged.
Now, it works pretty well and you can enjoy it for some hours.
Sadly, I also agreed with who have pointed out the slow developing of the product and that it was released a bit early.

Ok, but this is also a unique game. You'll not find anything like this in past and near future.
For me, now it worth the purchase, also because the developing seems to have accelerated.

For sim and strategy fans, this is truly a good product.

Split deck pathfinding has been fixed (as far as I'm aware), and crew management is now optional (AI autoresolve). A lot of the reviews here have had the complaints directly addressed in the 3rd game update, so I'd recommend giving it a crack if that's what was putting you off

Its still quite early access so don't expect a totally smooth ride, but the devs seem to be working on it at a pretty fast pace to address the problems

As you can see, I spent a lot of time in this game, but it ended up being fairly disappointing. I had high hopes for it since it seemed like it would be Traveller Deckplans: The Game, but absurd ship designs with inexpeclicable holes in the middle and terrible crew AI/pathing ruined it. The missions get repetitive and old very quickly and I found myself wishing I could just have the AI do it for me rather than spend an hour per ship design watching asteroids bounce off my shields.

The basic mechanics of the actual deckplan builder are all right, but you're constantly given contracts that you can't complete without a lot of research (which you won't be able to finish before the contract expires) and forced to deal with ship designs that are frustrating for the sake of being frustrating.

Maybe if the AI gets fixed so it can actually use the split deck that are forced upon you (or it gives you more options for reasonable ship designs without split decks) this game will be better, but for now skip it.

Very promising for such an early stage of development.

If it isn't obvious, the game is what it says on the tin. You are a corporation tasked with building Starships.

This is done by literally piecing together all of the internal modules of the ship using a given hull. This give a very high amount of complexity, and freedom to (try to) design the ship of your (clients) dream.

After you've (finally) pieced together your ship, you run it through a series of tests, to prove to your clients that your ship is the best. Admittedly, these tests can get EXTREMELY tedious, since each module requires maintenence by certain crew members, some of which require permanent staffing, or bad things may happen (nothing says "you dun ♥♥♥♥ed up" like your engine turning into an inferno on the inside, on the "normal operations" test). Fortunately, there is a new feature in a beta branch, testing auto resolve of some of these missions (or all of them if you wanted). Granted auto resolve isn't perfect, and in some missions, like boarding simulations, it's usually better if you handle the missions yourself.

The "business management" end of the game is a bit boring, and unnecessarily hands on at the moment though, which I believe can be solved with automation. Like, selling a type of ship for the same type of contract repeatedly, when they come up, instead of having to manually bid on each contact each time your competitors undercut you by a few bucks.

I do see some great potential in the game, but it clearly needs more polish. The concept however is great, and I'd very much like to see the game, and the developer succeed.

A good game that requires critical thinking and slow methodology.

Tutorial is best through ship design. Suggest just reading the pop up notes after that point. Game is less buggy after tutorial in new campaign.

Also advise using aotoresolvetest, info pinned in discussion forum. Manually playing protocol tests at least once ought to promote reconsideration of design layout.