I have experience with programming and a little modeling, but no I've never made a full game. And I know what you're already getting at and like I said above I'm WELL aware of how overly ambitious this may sound, but that's why I said, their will be many, many updates to the game. The first of which will be very simple and may only consist of the star freighters interior and doing missions around the ship for co-pilots and workers around the ship.

After the ship is where i'm comfortable with it, next comes outside the ship (space). as far as space goes, couldn't I just use a skybox that looks like space for most of the environment with a few spheres (planets) and obviously the players ship model? The way I'm planning to do it is in each region their's only a few planets on screen each time. Only the star freighter can bring you to other regions where the planets in that region will be generated during the loading screen between regions. To me, that's really all I can think of needing for the space aspect aside from the rogue mercenary and enemy ship models and other obvious things like the animation and stuff although I'm sure there's more.

Overall, I definitely expect a challenge, a big one, but one that can be achieved with enough time and dedication.

I'd like to make it clear, that i don't plan on diving straight into this guns blazing. I want to do some (ALOT) of personal testing, using different techniques for various aspects of the games look and feel and get WAY better with programming as well.

Which speaking of programming brings me to my next question, seeing as how this is an ambitious game I can imagine it will probably be pretty heavy for some users as well. Is their a way to make an "options" menu on the title screen so the player can turn on and off different aspects to make the game run better? Like turning off certain shaders, changing texture quality, things of that nature.