Each chapter has a few paragraphs about each race's general approach to space travel or general history as an intro. Each entry has a paragraph describing the ship and a little bit of its history. Mostly it's stats, but there's a little text holding each entry together.
Space combat, as written in the core book, is unworkable, in my opinion. However if you add in the armor damage rules that keep popping up on the forum here it starts to shape up. There are a number of other rules corrections and adjustments that have come up around here that probably make it better, but for simplicity's sake I think the armor damage rules are the most important, and cover the biggest gap in the rules.
That being said, however, I really like what they did with the space combat. It's abstract, so it focuses on plot and character involvement and not on speeds per second, hexes and the like. I prefer it, but I know it isn't for everyone.