Hey dfscott,
I am new here too playing this game for 2 months now but i think i can help on answering some of your questions.
1) Press the key "~" on your keyboard. It will give you a nice console-like text and you can see there message like alien or human kills, civilian casualties and more.
2) As far as I have noticed, no.
Picking it up simply means you can use it. However, my best guess is that if you use lets say an ammo of some sort that will not be available to sell afterwards. And if I recall correctly, when i forgot a stun rod on ground to switch for a pistol during a mission, I got that back after the mission (have to recheck though and I will come back on this post).
3) Yes.
The financial support you have is adequate to hold 4 bases on the easy level (around 900,000 credits). From that point on I just sell ufo ships and all alien equipment I collect to get the additional money I need to build more bases. And believe me, at least for the easy level they are more than enough i have 7 million credits and I have built as many radars and SAMs i could
. So as long as you go on missions and you manage to pick up material and sell UFO's you will be fine financially and that is your goal as income. And I know that on higher difficulty levels it is even more difficult to keep the various Countries happy so you mostly depend on these missions to get money. And unfortunately the higher difficulty level the less UFOs you spot.
As for production? I strongly doubt you will have the time to produce anything for profit since the hours spent for even electromagnetic rifle's ammunition is really a LOT. Just count on selling alien equipment, but one small advice. Keep at least one of the "unknown" flagged alien items in storage because it might be needed to trigger a research item, as soon its technological step advance is available.
4) Yes.
Make another production. You will notice on left side of the panel where you can set the number units you want to produce, two BIG arrows "up" and "down". You can use those arrows to change priority of that production. The only thing you have to do is to just press the arrow "up" to make the new production first priority, you will see that turning up first on the workshop's list and that way your ufo disassembly halts!
I was lucky that my first UFO disassembly did not have any antimatter although the popup did appear (but of course it showed 0 antimatter extracted anyway).
5) There is a button to kill alive aliens on the far bottom left corner of containment screen. I think there is no limit on the amount of dead aliens you might have but that I dont know for sure.
Remember the game is still under development and its not finished yet
Hope I helped, although I am so newby here
Any other more experienced guy please correct me if I was wrong on something!
Cheers,
Tzzimy