Easier said than done I'm afraid...especially if I don't 'cheat'.  I'm always tinkering with the ship AI, so you will probably see some improvement over time.

I've done some programming in the same vein myself, so I do appreciate that this is one of the hardest things to get right.  Far more important than ships not bouncing off each other is making the AI fight relatively intelligently.

I've tried assaulting a starbase a few times.  Every time, I've watched my heavy cruisers (love the little Enterprises) fire their heavy nukes at the closest turret and charge to short range faster than the heavy nukes can fly, resulting in them being wasted by the nuke volley they just fired.  I wind up left with just the ship I'm piloting every time, having wasted the rest of my fleet killing a single turret.

I'm going to try loading a pile of normal cruisers with heavy nukes and nothing else to see if they'll stand back and do what they ought to do if they don't have any shorter range weapons.  Of course, that means that they'll probably be eaten alive by the Mycon and Ur-Quan flying about the base.  

The status display in the next version will have a unique icon for each weapon so you will know what's installed on the current ship.  I'll look into adding some kind of onscreen damage report for other ships in your fleet.

Excellent.

The new version uses a unified cargo bay for the entire fleet.  You won't have to select a particular ship.

Making asteroid mining, etc. a little less tedious is a good thing.  I hope you'll be keeping special equipment like mining colony constructors tied to specific ships, though, so that players still have to worry about protecting given ships.

And, just in case the grousing's making this conversation seem a bit negative, I still love this game.

The Spathi Eluder can almost always defeat a probe.  The trick is to have a lot of patience.  Move toward the probe until roughly a third of a screen separates the two ships, then do a U-turn and fire a pair of B.U.T.T. missiles, one to each side of the probe.  Every so often, the probe will fail to avoid one or the other missile.

Also, always fire your missiles in pairs, not trios.  That leaves you with enough energy to toss one out if the probe somehow winds up close to you.  It will waste time avoiding the shot, allowing you to get out of its range.

The skiff can't control where it reappears when it teleports.  If it teleports onto an object--an asteroid, the planet, or your ship--it immediately dies.  I can almost always kill an Arilou skiff using a Vux simply by forcing it to teleport often enough with limpets.  The strategy takes a lot of patience, though.

I've been lurking here for a while now, happily playing UQM and browsing the posts.  Having finished UQM a few times in a row, I finally got bored enough to download Aftermath last night.  I don't think I'm going to be bored for a while.

This is a beautiful game!  I wish my store-bought games were half as pretty as this one.  I spent the first half-hour just tooling about the first solar system, loving the background, the planets, the asteroids, and the way my ship moved.  Giving nukes a vapor trail may not be scientifically accurate, but it's a great visual touch that adds a lot to combat.  I love the way the mining laser lights up whatever it hits.  The sounds are excellent.  The best thing is that it runs wonderfully on my antiquated machine; everything's smooth as glass, even with ten-plus ships in combat.

Now that the gushing's out of the way, I do have some observations and suggestions.  First, you might think about adding some kind of anti-collision logic to the AI.  With five or more ships in my fleet, it tended to look like I was being chased by the Keystone Kops every time I slowed down.  It was mildly annoying because just as I'd managed to slow to a crawl in order to mine an asteroid, they'd plow into me and send me flying all over again.  Collisions didn't seem to cause any damage, but it did occasionally lead to me nailing an ally big time with my mining laser.

Second, the triangle-over-trapezoid display for ship status is a little confusing.  One of my ships didn't have it (perhaps a bug?).  For the rest, it was pretty obvious after a while that the triangle changed color as a ship was damaged, but the trapezoid never seemed to do anything.  I did miss having the crew display because it's an explicit measure of damage, as opposed to the implicit fading to red.  I was never really sure of just how much punishment one of my ships could take.

Third, I found myself wishing for a little more information from the primary display.  A green circle or other indicator around the active ship would help, though it's not a big deal.  I had to wiggle my ship in order to figure out which one I was piloting after switching.  Along the same lines, some way of differentiating between ships (e.g. blaster ships v. nuke launchers) and, more importantly, discerning which ones are particularly damaged would be nice.  Jumping from ship to ship after each fight to take stock of the fleet was a bit annoying.

Fourth, I couldn't tell which of my ships was carrying my mine constructors after the fleet had done a little asteroid mining.  Some kind of cargo manifest would be helpful, and there's plenty of room on the screen for one.

Fifth, my mouse seemed quite slow during play.  Is that something you can control?

Sixth, the starbase interface involved a lot of selections made in the upper left corner of the screen, followed by clicking on buttons (buy, sell, etc.) in the lower right corner.  Combined with the slow mouse, this was the low point of the game for me.

Seventh, does being overloaded mean anything?  Whenever I put a warp engine in a ship, a message appeared warning me that my ship was overloaded--with an exclamation point, no less.  However, this didn't seem to do anything.  Is this just something that's only partially implemented?

Eighth, back to the gushing.  This is already a very nice game.  The foundation you've created is smooth, solid, reasonably intuitive, and absolutely gorgeous.  I'm already blown away and looking forward to seeing what this turns into down the road.  Very cool stuff, Madgap.