There have been a few more posts on the forums regarding The Foundry.

First, dstahl has answered some interesting questions about possible rewards for completing user-generated missions.

We do want player made missions to have rewards and are working on a way for them to “earn” the ability to give out rewards based on some criteria.

For example – to qualify for having a reward, it must be completed x number of times and have an average time to complete over x minutes. We can also scale rewards based on complexity of the mission and time for completion on top of that. In addition, placing some pre-made encounters guarantees that they will have standard loot drop rewards as well… so in essence, we expect that well made missions that players have approved will grant mission rewards that are worthy.

There is a lot riding on the rating system and how player made missions are policed by the community. We will be adding in features to flag content that could be considered exploitative or innappropriate and have mechanisms in place to ensure that players can’t “game” the system in any way.

But don’t expect to be able to place 100 goodie crates in a closet and call that a mission – its not going to happen.

Source: http://forums.startrekonline.com/showpost.php?p=3092060&postcount=28

Players will not be able to select specific rewards to hand out. I was referring to the ability for player authored missions to offer an “automatic mission reward” based on criteria.

Source: http://forums.startrekonline.com/showpost.php?p=3092113&postcount=31

Shortly after that, TauNeutrino chimed in with some more responses to questions raised in the impromptu Q and A thread:

Q: Will it be possible to modify output text based upon character level, or class? In other words, can I somehow grab variables in a script and alter my output text so that, say, science officers see something different from tacs, or VAs from CMDRs?

A: This feature is not currently implemented, although we will definitely add it to our dialog tree wishlist.

Q: Will we have some kind of test or private environment to work on/debug our missions prior to making them public, even if someone searches by our name or whatever? I’d like to be able to run through my missions and make sure they’re OK before anyone can play them, and I’m also thinking about a “weekly” sort of series to space things out.

A: This was a top priority in the design. We wanted to make playtesting your mission as easy as clicking the ‘Play’ button in the editor, so you can make sure everything works.

Q: Can we do the cool, big drop-down titles like the Breen missions have?

A: I profess ignorance as to how that works, so that’s probably a No. But I’ll ask around and see if that will fit on the wishlist somewhere.

As far as “shipping it when it’s done”, even our in-house tools don’t allow us make any mission that we can dream up, so expect at launch to write your missions around the capabilities of the tool. Like the game itself, the UGC system will get better as result of the involvement of the community, and that improvement will accelerate once the community can actually use the tool.

Source: http://forums.startrekonline.com/showpost.php?p=3092512&postcount=47

Thanks again to the Devs for answering.