Thanks for playing! I'm glad the atmosphere came across well. The original build was restricted in the art assets we could use so we tried our best to make it work within those constraints. I'm glad it paid off.
Definitely had a lot of back and forth about how easy/hard to make it. We wanted to ensure that you couldn't just slap one cargo hold and fly straight to the destination to win. We might have made the base fuel time a bit low, as I'm pretty sure all of our successful runs included at least one fuel tank but maybe forcing players to experiment a little bit is better. We'll have to play around with it more.
Same with the shield generators too, we actually buffed them quite a bit because we found there was little to no reason to take them in the original build. That's part of the reason we changed it so that adding extra cargo holds adds less cargo than the first one does. I did a run with just one cargo, three shield generators and a fuel tank and it worked but it might still be easier to do the same number of cargo holds instead of shield generators. I'll have to give that a try.
We'll have to come up with a way to better maneuver around turret fire. Right now pretty much the only thing you can do to avoid missiles is put an asteroid between you and it, but the projectile speed is a little too fast to reliably do anything like that. Thanks for all the detailed feedback on that! Really helps give us an idea of where we need to put the most effort to get it into a better spot.