Board games: rules? Just how different is it from monopoly?

SPACE INDUSTRIES: AGE OF DISCOVERY
A Monopoly-ish Game

Just because we have a 'board' with 'properties', 'community chest' and 'chance', And even 'currency' it's going to be different from monopoly in it's rules set. While you can allocate wealth to a particular colony until you reach one population, and landing on a colony belonging to someone else should come with a 'docking fee'. Even Derelict salvage and asteroid mining are a simple mechanism for collecting income when you 'pass go' (return to a shipyard). The problem is the ships.

Handling the Ship cards
In monopoly we as players would have one piece moving around a board, and that in this case would be the beginning of our problem. Ideally it would be a surveyor. We make a discovery and if we have a heavy tug card we pull that from our hand and use it to retrieve the salvage. So let us begin with a heavy tug card in our hand along with a surveyor card. We also have a game piece on the board. We can roll 2d6 and move our surveyor around the board and when it lands it makes a discovery. So how does the heavy tug work? If it is a heavy tug game piece then it should move out across the board to our salvage discovery and return the salvage to 'go' (a shipyard) to convert to cash. So you would have multiple pieces on the board. If however we stuck to just the surveyor as our piece, then the other ship cards might function in that we drop the heavy tug on our discovered salvage picking up the monetary value and returning the heavy tug to the bottom of our shipyard deck (along with any Derelict ship card) implying a turnaround.
Each time you return to the shipyard with your surveyor you draw a new ship from the yard to your hand. Meanwhile the flaw in the game is not having drawn a new heavy tug as replacement. So what if you as players play a heavy tug, and a referee plays the surveyor as a discovery piece? Your tugs race out and who ever gets there first collects the salvage. The further the surveyor gets from home-world the further your tugs must race to get the prize.

Derelict Ships?
While discovering a top secret project like starkiller adrift in space without crew is up there with finding the liberator adrift while transporting criminals to Cygnus alpha just how do regular ships convert to salvage? As a player who has drawn a ship and decided...'well, this is useless, so I salvage it.' it's also possible that a rival player drew a military vessel and used it to pick off one of your ships. Even a Ske-ud and kraken might Derelict your ship.

The discovery of asteroids means mining rights, a Derelict ship from the ships deck or dumped cargo means salvage, a top secret warship such as starkiller can be towed to a shipyard and is now in your shipyard deck as a potential ship, the same for the sphere builder which is reverse engineered. The Dyson sphere can be reverse engineered so you can build one around your colony to protect it from a starkiller, kraken, and ske-ud. A Ske-ud is the alien equivalent of a scout and retrieval tug and encountering one with anything less than a warship means your ship is attacked ad salvaged. Once the kraken salvage value reaches two population, 

• Once the kraken slams it's dark energy crystal into the sun cooling it and liquifying it the kraken can swim around its new home and with salvage accumulate resources until it can increase its population.
• The ske-ud, kraken, centurion, and great experiment can ignore transit arrows.
• A starkiller can take out a 'world'.

The Sun?
Oh right...find a sun tile below. Obviously unreachable by anything less than a kraken, ske-ud harvester, centurion, or great experiment. Of course if you use a starkiller to take out the sun...or the kraken achieves population you will want a Dyson sphere around at least one colony to survive. If you are the only one...game over, you win...sort of.

Anyway, that should give you somewhere to start...happy holidays.