Who needs Light of Altair when we have Sins?  Will it have an online multiplayer component?

it's a single player only game. If you want multi this isn't the game for you. But personally I'm a fan of single player, never even played Sins on line.  If multiplayer is your thing, then you won't like it. If singleplayer is what you like, check it out.  If not, well Sins rocks!

Hi, I am Lead Dev at SaintXi - We are very happy to be launching our game on Impulse in a couple of weeks  

Kitkun, during the tutorial missions everything is unlocked gradually as you need to use it. Building a shipyard allows you to launch a colony ship to the asteroid - you can only use it to design combat ships after you have researched the first combat ship class.

SaintXi Single Player Philosophy

We decided to make a great single player campaign, and sacrifice multiplayer to achieve the best possible result. 

As such everything is streamlined for the player:

• Full Time-Control to play at a rate of days or years, realistic journey times (Older ships take around 10 years for inter system journeys - but for the player that only takes seconds)
• Engaging story driven missions: Not everyone is an enemy - not everyone can be trusted. Changing alliances and new gameplay twisting events are custom made for each mission.
• Rich Simulated Universe: A gritty backstory that ties in closely with a realistic future history of Earth, technologies and developments take place in a coherent near future sci-fi setting. All battles have a wider context - there is no endless/meaningless warfare, and several missions have a much more economic theme.