Makes me wonder if there will be more Advanced Science ships to capture, and also whether there will ever be an option to have more than 1 Bonus ship to start a game with? Would be slick, even if it correspondingly bumps up the AI deployments as well.
My pleasure. There won't be new Advanced Research Stations, but there will be tons (and tons) of new ships to capture. Golems, as well as a bunch of new specialized ship lines outside of the starting ship classes, as well as some new Zenith Reserves that will give you a group batch of certain Zenith ships, etc. So, there's plenty to look forward to with any given game, and you should be able to field a bit larger fleets than before in the end.
For starting with more than 1 bonus ship at the start, you can simply select more than one home planet and that'll give you access to all of the bonus ship types there. You can have up to 8 home planets, so 8 starting bonus types, if you want. But since you can only unlock a 8 total bonus ship types in a game, that then makes the ARSes useless. Starting with multiple planets also has other effects (making certain things harder and others easier), so that's something to watch out for, too. I'd recommend no more than 2 or 3 starting planets for a regular-seeming game, though there are certainly those here who enjoy playing big 8-planet starts.