1) The range gets extended to at least 40-100ly (40 would be logical since it's also the bgs faction expansion range)
BGS expansion range (extended range) is 30 LY cubic, which is sufficiently unintuitive that they're unlikely to use it anywhere else. 30 LY sphere would be possible, though, if they wanted something a bit bigger than 10 LY.
- Are these contacts going to exist within every inhabited system?
- Or are these special contacts, similar to fleet carrier contacts, material traders, engineers, etc?
From what they've said, only in the bubble to start with. And presumably not in the core bubble systems where every system in range is already populated. Given that they get added by default to any newly-colonised system I can't imagine they'll be all
that rare.
- Is the 10 light year distance based on the location of the system colonization contact, or is it 10 light years from the current bubble periphery? I am assuming it is based on the location of the colonization contact.
That seems a safe assumption, given their later comments about chaining colonisation - though if the contacts are widely spread around the existing periphery the two should be mostly equivalent anyway.
(The follow-up that raises is what, exactly, is the bubble's periphery anyway? Does Maia and the Pleiades count? [1] Do "loose" but nearby systems such as New Yembo or Quince? Defining it as "the systems with colonisation contacts" keeps it dynamic.)
- Is this colonization contact available for other players to use?
- Can another player use the system I just created to jump 10 years away and construct their own station, or is that new contact open only to me?
I'd be very surprised if it was restricted to just you, since that would really slow down team efforts where your friend gets started on the next system while you carry on building up the first one - and with a short 10 LY range would allow players to monopolise bottlenecks far too easily.
- How is that faction identified? Will it depend on the station in which the contact is located?
Station owner of the starport with the colonisation contact does sound the obvious way, given how most other things work.
- If you are a single commander, without a squadron or faction connection, how is that handled?
Aligning a squadron to a faction requires you to be Allied with the faction (presumably, primarily, to keep the list of options smaller than all 70,000 of them). Something similar would make sense here.
(Follow-up question: are there any distance limitations on bringing in these
other factions and if so, how large? If the answer is "No" that probably explains why they're keeping things close to the bubble and even then allows for some weirdness)
- Will the BGS eventually impact your system? For example, if you have done the work to colonise a system, including bringing your faction into the system, can another faction come in and take over the system, impacting the government, commodities, black markets, etc?
Don't see why not, though they'd have to get close enough to do so in the normal way - and you could presumably bring in enough other factions that they'd at least have to do an invasion to get that far, set up the system assets for easy defence, maybe even deliberately make the system look boring to outsiders.
(Of course, why would they bother when they could just colonise their own? The number of BGS-active player groups seeking out fights for the sake of it is fairly low.)
How will BGS and Power Play 2.0 impact the authority of the system architect (see questions above)? Will a player be daisy chaining systems only to find prior links in the chain have been completely changed by BGS and PP2.0 activity?
From what they've said, you can only be System Architect for a single system at a time, so it's certainly possible that things will happen to ones you've moved on from. Of course, a larger player group would be able to hold
active Architect positions on multiple systems at once.