Gunship256 actually caught this one. It was driving both of us nuts for a little while.
Apparently having odd characters like that in an armor name causes issues with the armor dockscreen (the current one, not the old one). The problem probably also exists assorted device dockscreens, but that hasn’t been tested. On Windows, it crashes the game when going to look at an armor segment on the armor dockscreen with the Æ character in the armor name. On WINE, incidentally, the character or anything after it fails to display.
Unicode/special character support in Transcendence in general is......questionable. It can be extremely difficult, at best, to introduce exotic (or even simple accented) characters into things. Item names in particular can cause some significant issues. I think in the super-longterm a revisit of the way it's implemented is in order.
Yes, this is definitely a problem.
Historical example from me: I spent three entire weeks last year trying to find a way to get "Ōdachi" to work in an item name. No luck at all.