Pheralan

You are not forced in waiting for the "timer bars" to filll. You can go out, build things, go mine, go kill some alien herd of spacegoats.  There needs to be a progression system, because it's a game and people love seeing "your upgrade is completely" or, in more traditional MMOs, "CZ MATE, you reached arbitrary level X". IT's simple psychological rewarding when it comes to playing anything good sir.

I agree with most of your assumptions, and you are probably right in that well organized groups will immediately start expanding and constructing . This will also, as you said, lead to near instant conflict. One thing I'm not sure about, though, is whether this is a bad or good thing. One possibility is that the conflict will lead to lots of entertaining content and also increase the demand for materials, raising prices and helping to kick start the economy. It could also help check the rate of expansion for larger groups, giving the smaller groups a chance to not get left behind quite so fast. 
 
The main thing I am worried about is since everyone starts in the same safe zone, what if the first groups that go out end up forming a sort of ring around the edge of the safe zone, preventing others from being able to go out and acquire resources? That would sort of strangle everyone else trying to start out

Building an entire city that floats would be rather difficult depending on how the systems for fuel, lift, and weight work. If there's any system for weight and lift at all, I can imagine that you would need a whole lot of lift generation, which would mean a whole lot of fuel. 
 
But I can imagine that a traveling refinery or production plant would be incredibly useful, especially once resources start to become depleted near the starting zone.

i would like some Atlantis style city ship. but there is also the mean of connection between two of such ships floating in same ocean some sort of permanent docking so they can be really floating mega structures whit docking bays and construction terminals, where trade of all sort is possible and living community. but if under attack they can offer protection whit large shields and weapons.

i feel as though recourse gathering would be ten fold at the ability to move on when the surrounding area is depleted. the idea would not be so much a city that stays above the ground but one that moves from one location to the next then lands

I'll be trying to push the limits during alpha and beta, seeing just how big I can make something, how awkward or poorly a ship can handle, how fast I can make a ship built just to be fast, etc.
 
At launch however, I'll get my org together as best as I can, get into space ASAP and go pretty far out. Far enough that it would be pretty challenging to bump into us accidentally without sensors (yes and far enough for trade to be terribly inconvenient). Go isolationist for a while until we've got a general culture and uniform-ish look going. Once we've got a good mix of ships, weapons, loot etc...
 
We'll return to populated space, a foreign people with foreign looking tech, with our own isolated history. neat?