The team is busily working on v1.1.  I thought I'd show you some screenshots of what we've got done so far.  Probably a beta of this will be made public next week.

March 18, 2006:

The 3 features here we think will make people happy. Still tweaking the wording.

But basically you'll have control over whether tech trading is allowed. Blind exploration means you don't get to see the influence of a civilization until you've explored sectors that they're in. And minor races control whether they're in the game or not.

A couple things new on the ship design screen. First, you can now rotate components on the fly in the X, Y, and Z axis.  Pretty excited about that. You can even resize components after the fact once they're on. You can also rotate them after the fact.

What you can't see in the screenshot is that you can now pan with the left-click drag so managing much larger ships is much easier now. It should really free up how ships are made.

Sick of messing with what's in a given tile? The Fleet Manager is a whole new screen designed to let you organize what's in a particular tile. Still a work in progress.