Playing Synthetic. Upgrade shows it is earned with Colonial Engineering tech, but upgrade not available to select. Is it actually not allowed for Synthetics?

I can't find a changelog anywhere.

I cannot say which one i should hop in, believe i have the base game not having any DLCs over on IV yet. Would you guys recommend playing this or go on move to IV?

On a roll here, playing normal difficulty and the Drengin declare war pretty early (I am still building tiny ships, but building a LOT of them (yeah! zero maint!). Apparently the Drengin only had like 5 fighting ships when they declared, sent them in to harass. I killed them all and Drengin surrendered. Do I need to set it to 'Kill All'? Done tha before in other games and it can be quite tedious as I've had AI run away and hide on me in other gamess (VERY annoying!), so I prefer to not set that, but thi...

So I'm trying to build a custom ship, something that can deal with guarded anomalies or just anything really and yet no matter what I try EVERY design is ALWAYS inferior to the basic ones in every single way possible. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, I don't know why the weight limits are so low and the weight of equipment so high but it means that I can only have a ship do one thing, if it surveys it can do nothing else, if it has movement it can't do anything else, if I put one laser on the damn thing...