I've finally got around to finishing Diaspora R1 and I'd like to congratulate the devs on releasing such an entertaining game
I should say first that haven't watched any BSG (except for a couple of TOS episodes, a *long* time ago) so I've got a bit of an outsiders view.
Anyway, I really liked the new flight & combat model. It took a bit of getting used to (as I've had far more recent experience with the FS2 style flight model) but once I was used to it, it was a heap of fun. It vaguely reminded of afterburner slides from WC1/2 (hit their shield-less flanks!), except more flexible and "realistic" feeling (but not so realistic that you need a PhD to maneuver!). I found it quite hard to hit targets from medium/long range, but I did deliberately choose to play on "medium" to avoid having autoaim. I found the anti-fighter missiles a bit underwhelming, but I understand the need to balance outgoing vs incoming missile damage - being one-shotted by raider missiles would have been quite annoying. I didn't find conserving ammo a problem, due to my issues with hitting from long range I tended to get up close and use short, sharp bursts which generally worked quite well. I did find the lead reticle a bit unfamiliar at first, I think I was treating the direction-of-flight indicator as the lead reticle (oops!) which was very confusing and contributed to my inaccuracy issues. However, in the later missions where I finally understood it, it worked quite well. Lastly, I was really impressed with the games polish, the attention to detail was superb.
On the technical side, I am super impressed that the game remained smooth and responsive on my PC, despite the amount of firepower being thrown around by the Basestars and the Theseus. I think I only had a single crash (in mission 5), and one minor issue in mission 6:
where even though I'd landed with about 1 sec left on the timer the Prometheus jumped out without me, but then I jumped unassisted a few seconds later
(this was with the 1.04 patch)
I would have liked to see a few more missions, but I feel it's churlish to complain about this when everything else was so good. So in short, thank you very much, and I'm looking forward to seeing future releases