There's lots of info on the Kickstarter page, but yes, each role will have lots to do. In the tech demo, there's a tutorial where you start the ship up from a cold start to give you a taste of the engineering role. It takes a long time, you gotta start up the main reactor and distribute power. The ship has kilometers of pipes and wires that deliver power and resources around the ship, all of which need maintenance and repairs over time. When they go down, the components they supply go with them. Every role will have tasks, except passengers. Every role will be fillable by NPCs. If you want to be the lone head chef player on a ship of NPCs, go for it! Just pick the job that has the right amount of task time and type for you.

Landing on planets will be achieved by using shuttles, the big starship doesn't land. I'm very excited about flying shuttles.

Combat is definitely going to be a thing, ship to ship as well as small arms, repelling boarders or boarding something else yourself. Ship to ship combat is lasers and railguns, nothing that requires storing explosive chemicals for munitions.

Other races will be procedurally generated, as will their attitudes. They might want to hug you and give you cool technology to use or they might shoot strangers on sight, or something in between. If LLMs get their training sources sorted, costs down, and are able to run locally within the game client, then alien races might have lots to say. But those are big ifs.

Essentially, the story is we're humanity's first long range exploration vessel. We've only ever been to alpha centauri, and that took a long time. Now we need to go out and explore. Players will have the option to share game databases, so while we are in our own games and locally hosted servers, we can explore the galaxy together like it was an MMO.

This game isn't intended to be wall to wall excitement, this is going for a simulation, which means immersion, roleplaying, believability, and atmosphere are more important than constantly engaging in gameloops. It's going to be more exciting than flying a jet liner in flight simulator, but this isn't a very arcady experience. There is downtime, so I prefer bigger multiplayer servers to fill that time with hanging out or making our own emergent fun. That makes it more niche, not for everyone. But it is for me :).