Cool game!
With the amount of games that are "attach things to some ship and become stronger" it is nice to see one that gets some of the mechanics right, and has some interesting ideas to add to the mix.
I like how this game kind of self balances itself, where often once you have enough stuff you become relatively unstoppable, but in this one you kind of become less strong as you add more objects because it then becomes harder to dodge things. But, you didn't make it so that if you get hit you take overall damage, instead having you lose that section, which is such a smart idea. This allows for the player to get hit, which is honestly somethings a good thing since you want to remove some of the garbage builds you were doing in replace of a clean slate.
I do feel as though the movement is rather slow, I get that more thrusters (I think that is what those were? They didn't seem to always activate..) can make you faster, but it still felt like a bit of a slog at the start.
One thing, that a lot of these games I feel kind always frustrates me, is how difficult it is to place the new pieces onto the ship. Often times I found myself spinning to place a piece how I wanted it, but would accidentally hit it while spinning. I get that playing with the focus on making your ship more compact would prevent this, but maybe explore the idea of the ship not being able to add parts when it rotates.
Having a leaderboard is awesome for a game jam like this, it easily promotes replay ability for simple games, and it did tempt me to try it out... until I read those top scores and compared them to my own. Wow people have a lot of time.
A game like this can easily be expanded out with more things to add to a ship, and more enemy types, maybe even some more game modes. Like one that could rain down a ton of upgrades, so your ship is constantly changing, but there are also tons of enemies, or maybe the upgrades are temporary. Just thinking of some random ideas.
The visual theme is fun and interesting, now it just need some nice accompanying music to go along with it!
Great work!