Project Asinus is a spacegame we are creating as a group of independent game devs. But not just a simple spacegame, it's the most sandboxy spacegame you have ever seen, and hopefully unique for years to come.
First of all, there are no fixed spacecraft designs. Every spaceship is unique. Because you build it yourself. You place the engines and the cockpit yourself, you place doors, hallways and rooms, you place weapon batteries and life support systems yourself. Shield generators, stealth systems, hull design, cables, tubes - it's all up to you. You can design a freighter or a fighter, a battle cruiser or a carrier - or even an entire space station. Of course, a big spacecraft all by yourself is a bit boring. So you will form up in crews.
Crews can build and control spaceships together. Because you are not a spaceship - you are a person inside (and sometimes outside) a spaceship. You are the pilot, or the gunner, or the mechanic, or a soldier, or an engineer. Or a mixture of it all. Or whatever else you can think of. So your spaceship design matters, because it will be your base of operations. You can form up as a group of pirates in small fighters, or in a bigger multi-crew spaceship. A spaceship without someone handling it is as dangerous as an asteroid drifting through space.
This also means that spaceship fights are not limited to flinging missiles at each other - you can weld enemy spaceships open, board an enemy ship and simply kill the other crew directly.
There will be spacefights, trading, mining, crafting, fighting, newtonian spaceflight, pirating, player driven economics, changelogs, planets, hyperdrives, drama, mercy & lack thereof and last but not least: permadeath.