[Maneuvering wants a fairly complete re-work]

Giving the user a GUI means of setting a rudder angle seems entirely wrong for a game at this level.  It is just too close to the hardware and demanding of the player's attention when he must also attend to other duties (I'm guessing this advances beyond one ship against one ship ... I am on level 3 of the tutorial).

Fleets of this era (indeed, since Trafalgar and earlier) maneuvered in divisions, usually in line ahead.  Divisions, in turn, took up position relative to another division or were told to turn to a given heading.

There have been plenty of games which answered to such a design.  It produces orderly (well... YMMV) battles that are easier to command at the high level and a rather chess-like match of position and maneuver. 

I would be happy to share a copy of the Royal Navy or the Imperial German Navy's signal books, which provides a good overview of their systems of maneuver and command.  They lend themselves to simplification, but you would see that their very nature is quite different than what your design is offering players.

tone

 

[Parts "badly placed"... like which?]

This report needs some work.  It is very frustrating to be told that parts of the ship are poorly positioned, without guidance being offered.

tone

 

[Most of the particles are WAY buggy on my machine]

I play on an iMac booted into Windows 10, and most of the particle emitters have some of the smoke particles as large black rectangles that spin and move and change scale -- they simply have no texture applied to them.  A few of the smaller particles render correctly.

Is this a known issue?

tone