Looking at the UI, I see consistently applied patterns in a pretty normalised layout. I don't know how to use any of the controls, but that's because I don't know how to steer a warship, not because the UI is bad. Had I known what "gang" means in this context, the problem would've been clear from the very first screenshot. Yes, the UI is ugly as sin, but it doesn't need to be pretty.

A barely trained 18 year old on months of sleep deprivation couldn't figure this out, but that's an impossible standard to design for. The entire ship was designed to use computer aided navigation anyway, but apparently that's being disabled by default.