@kilvenny
I'm not sure how many ships and players are going to fit in an instance. They've said differently when answered that question before. And to be honest, I don't think they know themselves yet because it's not balanced yet. Optmizations in the game (rendering, for instance) and in the server structure will probably allow more ships, the new zone system will also probably allow both more ships and players, and so on.
So it's not yet determined how many ships and players will fit in each instance. We'll just have to wait and see.
About how many players vs NPC's there'll be they've also said differently in the past. In the early days of the project CR said it'd be approx. 20 million NPCs filling up the universe, and then that number would decrease to fit players so that basically each new player replaces one NPC. Now, when you look at the number of players currently, it's about 850,000 (or less) and that means a ratio of 4.25% players - if all backers were to play the game. To get upto 10%, as they are mentioning now, they have to have 2 million players. We also know that at the moment only a small amount of backers actually play the game regularily - maybe 8-10% of the 850,000 - so the the real percentage of NPCs will actually be much higher than 90%, in reality.