You can take on board various crew member (characters) with different weapons: havy troopers with machingun, fast infantryman with plasma rifle or other. Each character has its own stats: running speed, health and several weapons.
Also you can customize your own ship by installing various weapons modules and internal modules such as reactors, engines, ammunition storages, boarding modules, etc. In future planned manual placement of small modules such as doors and create of own blocks of the ships.