The manual link on the Steam store page. It isn’t very in depth, mostly giving the basics about the game.
2nd game is going better. Currently in first and just coming up about 40 votes short in the galactic council’s first 2 elections. I completely misunderstood the ship support point display, and for a long time though the +# was how many points I was using instead of how many were free. Finally noticed it in the tooltip.