Hi Burfreezy.
I have had the same issue and it was driving me crazy as every other game worked.
I could only get Starmade to work with the old launcher, the new launcher either directly on my desktop or through steam would state "running" then "sync" which meant the game had crashed then
The issue for me was not Win 10, Antivirus, old java versions (shouldn't matter with the launcher anyway).
I have got Starmade to run with the new launcher now, it appears that my AMD drivers were not updating correctly, it was necessary to remove all traces of AMD, easier said than done.
I performed a win10 reset, it was the last option and it has worked.
After backing up games, files etc the process took about two hours and my overall FPS has increased now for all games.
Good luck.