I often give the "new game" thing a few tries until I see a starting position that I like. With the most recent public preview of the upcoming patch (that I got by joining that steam channel), galaxy generation sometimes crashes; before the most recent DLC it never did so (I haven't played the game with the new DLC without the preview enough to know if it also crashes this way).

My usual settings:

7 competitors, endless speed, normal game difficulty, normal pirates, spiral-7, many constellations, exceptional galaxy size, high galaxy density.

Here:

DxDiag.txt

output_log.txt

If it's going to crash, it always crashes after "Game Launched" is displayed and before "Game Launched and Ready"

cool rig. wouldn't be a spec problem.

A common culprit for this problem are antivirus software or cloud storage software denying the game access to the files it needs. Can you check if you can whitelist the game folder (steam install folder and in Documents) and see if it still crashes?

I don't have any software of this sort installed, and it never crashed this way with the pre-DLC version of the game.

If you have not manually installed any antivirus software, I believe Windows has a built-in default antivirus (Windows Defender, I believe), so you may want to check that.

I'll get back to you once I've had time to properly check the logs you provided.