Thanks for the interest, everyone. We seem to still have a few spots open, so I'll wait a bit longer. This is a return to the game after a long hiatus for me, so I hope that y'all will forgive me if I'm slightly rusty when we actually get into it.

To respond to a few of you:
Clumsy: Yes, pilot, Navigations Officer, same thing.

Rhymer: Yeah, I envision it the same way. It's up to y'all what races you want to play, but I would hope that there is some diversity. The way I envisioned the universe is that, while there were some interstellar races in the milky way community prior to humans getting on the board, humans brought many more along with them, as they travelled through the galaxy making contact with more primitive civilizations. These contacts were made in the name of evangelization, and, after astonishing the less advanced species with technology beyond their comprehensions, used the story of Jesus journeying through the "heavens" after leaving Earth to explain the culture's own mythologies. Then, in exchange for conversion, the church helped the alien civilizations set up their own space programs to join the galactic community. While this seems as though it was a generosity, the church (or, rather, it's exclusively human hierarchy) has utilized this influence to dominate and manipulate the exospecies. While I was originally going to name this after some generic alien-sounding deity in order to avoid offending the religious, one day while I was thinking about rebooting this I had an epiphany: "God damn Space Mormons". Too good to pass up. Plus this, I feel, explains the religion's spread through the galaxy and alien species' willingness to fanatically participate in a human dominated religion a lot better. 

So anyway, yeah. Multitudes of alien races. Hopefully.

Plant: Cool. I've never read that, or even any of his other works. I'll add that to what I'd like to check out, along with the good old A Song of Ice and Fire series.