I agree that trading seems largely pointless. I ended up extremely overpowered in combat when I played on the lowest difficulty. The middle difficulty seems a bit more sensible so far, but I haven't finished my run yet. Been enjoying the game overall though. Can't say I ever ran into the need to scan planets as a result of an away mission.
They added manual saving in an update a few days ago.
Damn, so five whole days of the Iran war would cover it for a whole month for everyone?