Is there a likelyhood of the game being available on steam in the near future?
Probably not in the near future. Going to take a serious look at it as the game nears completion, though.
I know that there are standard ship chassis but just how modular are they?
My other question is when you destroy an enemy ship does it actually hurt the faction that owned it? What I mean is do they have to expend resources and time to replace it or does a new one just spawn in?
All the weapons can be changed (there are several classes and sizes of weapons, a weapon slot has a class and a size, and smaller weapons can be put into a larger slot for a bit more flexibility). There will also be hull mods that affect ship stats. All of these use up "ordnance points", so you might trade off more powerful weapons for less armor, for example.
And yeah, the idea is that fleets cost resources (and continue to cost resources such as fuel and supplies, while operational). We'll have to be careful with that to avoid the sector either degenerating too quickly or being overrun with fleets, though.
Are there any plans for a system of capturing enemy ships? Like disabling them (either through regular damage or some specialized weapons like EMP) and then boarding them? Or perhaps even boarding pods that can be fired after a ship's shields are down.
Also, I hope you guys don't have a problem with the name. Searching for it came up with a bunch of other games. Some kind of tabletop RPG game called Starfarer, an indie RTS game called Starfare, and an MMO named StarFarer with a very minimal web page that didn't give much info.
Yes for capturing ships, no particulars yet though. One thing I really want to see is being able to salvage floating derelicts that are the remnants of a previous battle... would give a sense of history to the world.
About the name - "Starfarer" started out as the working title and just kind of stuck. Hopefully we'll be fine... The tabletop one is a different medium, the RTS one is in fact a different name (I didn't actually find it during some initial googling about a year ago...). The "StarFarer" one seems to exist for the purpose of having ads on that page. I strongly suspect there isn't an actual game behind it. Was trying to get that domain name, but the email it's registered under is invalid, so I couldn't get in touch with those guys.