Finally played this for the first time last night and had a lot of fun. We had 5 players using a mix of Windows laptops, 1 MacBook running Parallels with Windows and an iPad.
The server kept crashing at the beginning and we think it was due to a player trying to rename one of the ships. Once he stopped fiddling with that, we didn't have any trouble.
The iPad would drop its connection to the server every 10-15 minutes, sometimes a couple of times in a row. Simply hitting the reconnect button would put it right back into the game so it wasn't TOO big of a problem.
We all went into the game pretty cold without having read any of the manuals. Clearly, our first outing or two didn't go so well. Our second mission ended up with us stranded in deep space all alone with our ship gradually deteriorating. All the repair crews had died in fires around the ship caused by overloading systems. We never encountered an enemy but ourselves.
In response to one poster's comments about multiplayer with voice chat. The game is playable over the Internet. You'd have to setup some port forwarding for the server and you would have to use some other tool for voice chat, like Skype or Vent or Teamspeak, and you can do that today.
It's good, clean fun. Try it out!