How do we plan on optimizing the game once everyone who's everyone gets their hands on a capital ship? (assuming that we can) In Border Skirmish and Critical and Central Hive Skirmishes, it occurs to me that the number of capital ships may be responsible for the framerate that I get. (It is more likely the sheer number of ships, but moving on.) The point is, how are we going to keep things pretty, but running decently for those of us with lower end computers?

I dont think everyone will be able to get their hand's on a capital ship.
They should make them pricey enough and available to people in guilds with more than 20-30 members, so that they are more guild-oriented, and not just for individual use. Also, maybe even a cap on the amount of capital ships a guild can have at a given time.

If you have a look at the News and the changelogs, you'll note that they will be adding computers to the server clusters (soon, not Soon™) and have been optimizing the client software here and there.

"Server Changes: Related to fixing the above instabilities, I'll be doing some maintenance this coming week on our server cluster. Because of this, we'll probably have a small scheduled downtime somewhere in the next two weeks (an hour or two, during low usage time). During this combined bugfixing / upgrading process, we'll also be bringing online five new dual-core cluster servers, to further improve our capacity to handle various large-scale gameplay (Border-Skirmish-like stuff, and so on). I'll post about the scheduled downtime when I'm closer to being ready to roll out."

In a related vein: I've now read and typed "soon" so much that I'm starting to have trouble recognizing the word.

You'll get over it soon.

It's a fine balance. Support hardware that's many years old or push the envelope for cool stuff.