On open universe. We are absolutely certain that there will be no open universe. This has been fully confirmed by the devs about 5 days ago when Uhmari quoted the old dev answer saying that there will be no open universe from late march 2013 and asked from the devs in russian “ask the devs thread” why they don’t want to implement open world. Dev answer was a one liner: “Because this is a session based game”.
Notably this coincides with the last time Uhmari logged into the game.
Greetings!
Okay, so, what i want to say about sector conquest:
This is a new feature, and we are going to work on it, if you have suggestions, please post them in a relevant part of forums. 
We Are reading through them, no kidding.
One more thing to add: our games keeps developing and who knows, maybe in the near future we will think of something other than sector conquest.
Just because its a session based game, some kind of “universe” is not out of the question. I think, it was more to clear up a fact, which came out of an expectation. For anyone who knows about how open universe games work, it was clear anyway, that it isnt in the plans. Because, it isnt doable. period. If it was in the plans, it would be worse in my opinion, because i would not trust a dev, who does not know the theories of today’s network principles.
However, Sector Conquest seeming a bit shallow like it is now, it clearly would not work with “all open fronts” at the moment, due to player numbers.
I would like them to definitely improve the Sector / Map mode to something more dynamic, so the battles also feel to be a part of something bigger, and we are all not just names on a nameboard.
However, the initial Federation Storm after the release of the conquest maps, and the player based resistance by certain corps dedicating themselves to a losing side, did have its appeal. I personally wanted to know, what happens if we get to the core of another empires map, thats why I am a bit disappointed by anyone who finally joined Jericho, but it did create a bit of “connection” to the factions.
The most important thing in a space game is to feel home and fall in love with your spaceships. I think such a feeling can be done, even more, on this basis, also without the same “sandbox principle” other space mmos have, I mean clicking launch and flying in battle is sometimes the best thing in the world, but I miss a bit the watching of markets and a bit more in depth balance to the whole ship thing. I would love a mix of a bit of strategy and commerce on the sector-conquest side, but it would be an entirely other game, where battles are decided by the ships flying. Much like dust/eve supposed to be.
I also dislike games, where certain ships only fullfill a placeholder role, but well, I guess I have to live with it here. I am happy if the ingame balancing gets ironed out first, because we do not have enough community atm anyway, to support bigger gamestyles, waiting times would be even longer.
Having PvE’s and all kind of PvPs also connected to the whole thing which is going on on the Starmap would be definitely cool.
As long as the core gameplay stays bug-free, fast and beautiful.