In addition to the skills that must be acquired by players such as ship piloting, will there be any character based skills or perks such as being able to speak alien languages?asked by Space Monkey

I'm not sure, right now our whole goal is to focus on you own skills, like how you fly, and then you can get better equipment that helps you fly better. Right now we're trying to avoid having players that have "ratings" or "levels" for skills. NPC will have a kind of rating however, and things like Morale, and aggression, and accuracy for pilot stuff, because we have to track them. As a player, though, it's more about how well YOU do something. As far as skills like being able to speak an alien language goes, you'd probably just get better and better versions of a google translate, like the babelfish in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Most of the stuff we do will be based on the player's own skills, we'll just allow technology and equipment to better facilitate that.