I worked this week on making it clear what components are valid for what slots. There are three slots, Engine, Weapon and Miscellaneous. Engines and weapons can only go into engine or weapon slots, but a miscellaneous component (like shields or generators) can go into either a weapon or miscellaneous slot. The trick was figuring out how to communicate that in a way that felt natural. I think I managed to do that. 
The Engine and Weapon components clearly don’t fit into any other slots, and the miscellaneous components can fit miscellaneous and weapon slots. I suppose play testing will demonstrate whether or not that works out. There’s an indie game night in two weeks, so that will be a good chance to try it out.
I’ve got a few more enhancements planned for this screen. When you’re choosing a ship and equipping it I want to have a ruler or something similar that gives some sort of sense of scale for the ship. I’m also going to add indicators to show which direction a weapon will fire if mounted on a particular slot. Related to that is some sort of way to view the overall weapon ranges of the ship. Finally I also want to add a display that shows how maneuverable the ship is. Components have weight, heavier components can drag down the maneuverability of the ship, but to manage that you’re really going to need to have an idea of how the maneuverability is being affected.
Lots of good stuff in the plans, but I’m thinking that some of it may be unnecessary to get the game into people’s hands so that they can start playing with the modification and hotseat multiplayer. We’ll see.