Patch 1.50 is up and sending ships to other players universes is now a thing. That was the Christmas surprise.
Changelog here.
There's a lot that can be asked or discussed about the feature, but I'm interested to see where they'll take it. More info can be found on their Wiki,
here.
It seems modified games can't send out ships, but can receive them. That probably means no Ventures for me, maybe ever..
I also see that you can gain "EgoCredits" (says on the Wiki it's for future use), and from what I heard from an interview from the lead dev, they are clearly looking into microtransactions and probably wondering if they could have it in their games. The example he gave of cool microtransactions was Elite Dangerous paint mods, which AFAIK is not a bad thing (I can't remember the price of customization stuff in E:D) and wouldn't be THAT bad on X
at first glance, except that it would be a singleplayer game with a weird microtransaction system added to it..
Knowing a bit of the community, some people would just make mods to ignore or bypass microtransactions if that ever happens - there's already a mod that makes all paint mods available to buy from in-game traders anyway, for example.
Just stressing that what I say above is pure speculation, although it's too easy to speculate on, given what's out there.
PS: I'm not even gonna mention the obvious shitstorm that could brew up if people start saying they are implementing an online-feature + microtransactions framework in an incomplete, unfinished and buggy game. Oh well, I just did..