I'm a big fan of the series, and I enjoyed this release too, but...
There are still a few bugs & glitches, for instance the lab components collected on the battlefield gave me the wrong ingredients back in the lab (blue was inverted with yellow) and choosing one upgrade sometimes gave me the other, back in the store.
The glitches compound a balance issue, in that the lab products give disappointing weapons (no enough ingredients spawn on the battlefield to make it worth grinding for hand-made guns) and it is possible to box yourself in a no-win situation if you chose the wrong upgrades, early on.
In the mid-range levels, it is possible to have levelled up some elements (by neglecting others) in such a way as to have an OP'ed ship, taking out the challenge of designing for a level's specific threats, and making sailing through levels sort of grind-ish.
Meanwhile, you get so many diamond crystals as opposed to the other pickups that converting you whole collection to new or improved components is never much of an issue.
So, the crucial decisions to make happen during the learning curve, as you try to suss out what has changed from releases 1 & 2 of the series. Past this hump, resource management & ship design become trivial tasks.
So, 3 stars for continuing the series, 1/2 for having changed up the mechanics a bit, and another 1/2 in good faith that you will work at putting the challenges back into ship designs & resource gathering (perhaps adding a few more side missions that make weapon choice & placement crucial again, & yield a few extra lab ingredients, or wacky alien components like a grappling hook, a repulser ray or a magnetic boomerang thing. Make us maneuver & burn fuel to use them!