Great MOD! I like it even more than famous NSC, actually - this one feels kinda more elegant, at least in early game. Well done, ty!

But after giving the MOD some extensive testing I mentioned some bugs, accumulated couple second thoughts and come up with a few suggestions. So here it comes...

1) In vanilla version Droids differ from Robots only by a smaller penalty to resource output, while technically staying the same inefficient except for mineral production. I suggest to tweak it - let Droids get a +10% benefit to energy output (benefit instead of a penalty). Kinda forms a logical progression: Robots r good for minerals, Droids - for minerals and energy, Synth - for everything. Each upgrade gives benefit, fair enough, IMO.

2) In vanilla, the planet capital buildings provide adjacency effect benefit for Food, Mineral and Energy, but not to research. I suggest to tweak it, so the capital provide +1 adjacency for ALL types of resources - Food, Energy, Minerals, Physics, Society and Engineering. This will remove the headache of determining a place for Capital on newly colonized planets with multiple scattered research tiles. Pedantic players will love it, I assure u. :)

3) BUG: the auto-upgrade edict does not upgrade Heritage site building.
And Science lab too, which is understandable, since it has branched upgrade path. However, not sure if possible, but very much desired to make it auto-upgrade the Science Lab to the type providing benefit to research with lowest current income per month. OR simply introduce a 4th upgrade branch - "Science Institute" providing equal amount of Ph&S&E to become a default option for the upgrade.

4) Since more building upgrades introduced in this MOD, the amount of micromanagement (which was terribly high even before) become overwhelming. The auto-upgrade option is a must! But the way it is currently introduced does not help a lot. I suggest moving it from the planet policy toward the empire-wide edict, so all the buildings will auto-upgrade while this edict is active. Let it has no cost, but provide no benefits - let it just do the background clicking for the busy player and that is all.
Oh, and don't forget the auto-upgrade of spaceports. However, this may need to be a different edict.

5) A questionable suggestion - maybe let each upgrade of the capital increase the core sector systems capacity by 1?..

6) Never used Afterburners seeing no much benefit from slightly increased combat speed. I suggest changing them to add evasion benefit as well. How about that?

7) U made armor provide hull points - excellent idea! But why the increase is so negligible? See, if I decide whether I want to add an extra shield or an extra armor, I look at the amount of hit points it provides. Comparing the shield and armor of the same tier the answer is completely obvious (on top of that, shields regenerate also). So I suggest the following:
make the armor component provide the amount of hull points equal to the half of the amount the shield component of the equivalent tier provides. So if a small Deflector gives +20 to shields, let the Nanocomposite Armor give +10 hull points.

8) BUG: in my game I used the warp drive, but the trade fleet ships I checked were flying on hyperspace drive. What is the point to configure them in the designer then? I suggest remove the design from the designer - it is cluttered already anyway, let the trade fleet use whichever components they want unless player builds them manually, which is not the case. Awesome addition, BTW, love those traders sneaking around. :)

9) Those "Ancient" technologies... OMG, honestly. First off, the name - "Ancient". How can something newly researched be ANCIENT? It is not OLD! And it is not even a reverse-engineered tech of some Fallen Empire player beats, which would make sense this way. At least rename it to, let's say, "Ultimate", for God's sake... But honestly, so many additional upgrades do not add any juice to the game. The neverending clicking for +10% more of smg is rather annoying. If it would be just 1 more tier, unlockable by some special event, then it will be interesting. But in the current state - just a boring micromanagement.

10) BUG: many ship's and military station's sections (those which include Hangar slots) are bugged: the weapon configuration of the CHOSEN section does not always correspond to what was DECLARED on selection. I mean, when I try to select a section with 5H slots I get a section with 2H and 3L weapon slots instead - or smg like that. Here are few examples:
Dreadnought, 1st section;
Carrier, 3rd section;
Titan, 1st, 3rd and 4th sections;
Most military stations...
Please fix it, otherwise it is not possible to equip a ship with a lot of H slots utilizing a true Carrier potential.

11) Funny thing: u write number 8 as "IIX", while the correct way is "VIII". Understandable, but well, heh. :)

12) Military stations are built too fast. Comparing the time it takes to build a Titan and Citadel and the difference in military power they have... I would say, slow it down, because currently it is just broken. :P

13) I like the idea of Carriers being a support ships providing aura, but their behavior is completely wrong. First off, ALL of the ship types in ur MOD charge at enemy and orbit around target at small range, no matter which combat computer is equipped. This is wrong - the role of the Carriers is to sit at the very back providing the aura and let the strike craft do the job. Those ships should only equip PD, Flaks (M slots) and Hangars. Plus an X-size weapon, maybe. They should exhibit a Vanilla's Battleship combat behavior, stopping at max range right after the engagement, sending strike craft ahead.

14) X-weapons become useless with the current charge&orbit behavior because they have a small angle to fire, and when orbiting starts, enemy is at the side, unreachable to the X weapon. Not sure if the same applies to Torpedoes, but maybe. The thing is that there are no "stay at range" combat computer option for the artillery-designed ships, and that removes range advantage tactic.
See, in vanilla version my tactic was to spam a few dozen of Battleships with Arc Emitters - this way the enemy fleet was annihilated before they could reach their fire range. So if both fleets were equal power, mine had just a few ships lost - those single ones going ahead for some strange reason.
I kinda understand what made u change to charge&orbit behavior for ALL ships, but it is inefficient and very bad, especially in a war with Unbidden, where range 60 is lethal. The defensive combat computers are NEEDED.
For the carrier ships, we need a stay_at_max_range behavior. Those ships should stop once engaged and do not get close at any case, since strike craft deployed at any range once engagement happened.
For the X-weapon equipped snipers we need a stay_at_110_range artillery behavior.
For the rest of the ships (and AI-controlled ships) the charge&orbit_at_20_range is fine.

My vision of the combat is that we have a huge flagman ship ahead, charging at enemy and tanking all the damage for the duration of the battle (but not dealing much damage), then we have few carriers behind, equipped with Strike-Craft and PD only, and the majority of the fleet consists of smaller glass-cannon ships sitting behind the flagman shooting enemies from the safe range, dealing most of the damage. Whichever side finishes the enemy's capital ship first will probably win since the rest of the ships pop like bugs.
I see this mod has a potential to introduce REALLY BIG ships thanks to the Reactor core component individual to each design, which kinda hides half of the ship's utility slots implicitly filling them with reactor components. True thing, the ship size limitation comes from the fact that bigger ships mean more sections with more slots to fill, half of which are reactors anyway. So reactor core is a very smart workaround. But this will only give room to double the ship size. To go beyond that, something different is needed. If it is not possible to introduce a new utility slot sizes bigger than Large, I suggest to rescale the slot components, so 1 medium becomes functionally equal to 8 small and 1 Large - to 64 small (or 8 medium): 1L=8M=64S. What do u think?