Give it a year
There will be T8 ships available only to people who have lvl 75 characters
or there will be t10 ships in the z store

but you want a fleet ship
well once bases are the right size a lot of alt fleets will be taking "1 day" members
join take a ship and leave

no worries

Only, they make it sound like you gotta be relentless in taking part in these fleet projects to get the ships.

Which makes me wonder what happens when the starbase is fully upgraded (cause then the projects would stop right?)

From what I saw currently on Tribble, there will be new ground weapons and gear available to fleet members in fleet stores after leveling up a fleet starbase to at least Military Tier 1.

However, from what I saw, the new fleet ground weapons and gear are comparable to the new STF weapons gear, and not much of an improvement over the currently craftable weapons and gear.

Note: I did not say the "same" weapons and gear, but definitely comparable in stats.

As I said in my earlier post, it looks like those who do not or cannot have advanced fleet starbases can get comparable weapons and gear from other sources, such as STFs and crafting.

And players can solo STFs or do their own crafting with less resources than buliding fleet starbases.

Meh. I still feel like they swapped everything to using Dilithium (even crafting, which was a stupid idea IMO), then jacked the prices so high you have to literally focus all your gathering on a single use. Advanced hanger pets, crafting, c-point gaining, new ship, fleet stuff? Can't do more then one at a time due to how insane the prices are.

Yeah, that is a valid point.

I heard fleet members chatting as to how to be fair to all fleet members, to permit each to contribute to fleet projects in order to get a share of the fleet credits, so that they can obtain the new fleet gear and ships when the starbase is advanced or even completed.

No, there will be fleet provisioning projects afterwards.

At every stage of the construction of the fleet starbase, there will be a regular need to re-provision the starbase; that is, as some members buy from the fleet vendors, others can re-stock the fleet vendor inventories by contributing to fleet provisioning projects, and thus earn their fleet credits to buy from the fleet vendors.

Fleets will only have as small or large problems and the fleet leaders who lead them can handle.

The picture in my mind at this very moment?

Unloading a cargo bay of stuff to the starbase quartermaster, to turn around and buy something out of that pile .

Are the 'fleet ground weapons' unique models, or just generic phasers/disruptors but with shiny stats?

Unique models. I got a Mark 12 antiproton split beam rifle in the fleet vendor on Tribble, with better stats than my old Mark 11 antiproton split beam rifle.

However, there were different types of weapons (sniper rifles, pulse weapons, pistols, etc.) of different energy types (tetryon, plasma, etc.).

They were all Mark 12, if I recall. And even though they said they were Fleet ground weapons, they are NOT limited to use in fleet starbase actions. On Tribble, I brought in my new Mark 12 ground weapon into a ground mission in Delta Volanis to test it out and, yep, it worked.

However, some fleet weapons and consummables are limited to fleet starbase activities, such as fleet turrets to defend the starbase.

Just a note: I don't recall seeing weapons below Mark 12, so perhaps low ranked fleet members can only get their Mark 5 or Mark 8 gear outside the fleet starbase.

If I recall, some Dev on the forums mentioned that the fleet starbase vendors and ships are for max-level characters, but I'm sure low rank fleet members can still contribute to get and save their fleet credits for when they hit level cap and so they can use the Mark 12 gear and ships.

Considering how fast one can reach the level cap via the Duty Officer system, they probably figure most Fleet members will be at the cap in short order.

I'm thankful that they made missions scale to level so that we don't outlevel them while we do Doff missions.

... Unique MODELS, not STATS.