After giving the most recent Kickstarter update video a listen, I got a nice little nugget of info.
~Blueprints will not be wiped between Alpha, Beta, and the Release.
This gives a tangible advantage to players at the gold level and higher, as the time they spend building (and helping test for that matter) the voxel system, ship building, and base building will get to carry-over all of their blueprints and potentially have an economic advantage at game launch. While other players are trying to develop ships from scratch or working off of the start ships, Alpha/Beta players will already have designs with a slick uniform look and possibly so will their respective org. Despite not having access to all launch features, this makes ORG play viable at least in Beta to acquire an advantage for main release.
Does this provide an unfair advantage to Alpha/Beta players? An advantage sure, however our characters probably won't get to keep the levels we had to gain to make those builds possible. When the wipe hits after beta and before main launch, every other tangible resource will still be an obstacle for players who have a bank of blueprints from the previous versions.
I for one will try to flex my Alpha and Beta muscles with the Alchemists to get a head start on builds!
Pretty neat eh? I'd HIGHLY recommend upping those pledges to at least gold at this point if you haven't already