Update 06/04/2014: Player Ships and UI
Buying and equipping ships occur at Shipdocks, which are scattered around the sector.
Drone ships can select to carry either combat or support drones. The drones orbits the ship in realtime and is independent in selecting targets. Support drones restore your shields.
Also just found today a ton of real NASA images (Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech) and they look amazing as backgrounds for systems. I shrunk them down to 512 pixels (to reduce vram usage and filesize on mobiles) and blown it up ingame so its pixellated on bigger screens, but on mobiles it looks stunning. So it was a waste of time to actually make my own nebulas and galaxy... lesson learnt. Don't reinvent the universe when NASA supplies stunning images for you to use.