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[Snapshot]

Is boarding ships and capturing them planned?

[IonDragonX]

They are not planned.
Edit Boarding after combat used to be a thing but were cancelled.

[SCC]

Boarding during combat was never a thing. Boarding after combat was a thing for some time, but it was unsatisfying and was replaced with ship salvaging.

[Megas]

As SCC wrote.

Boarding before 0.6a, when the game was called Starfarer in most of those releases, was kind of fun, but too rewarding (pristine ships because no D-mods at the time).  End result is reminiscent of modern ship recovery.

Boarding after 0.6a (but before ship recovery in 0.8a) was a frustrating random slot machine experience where the most reliable and riskiest option still only had about 37.5% chance of success on the ships that mattered (and less than 10% using the safe but expensive option), and you could only board one ship at the end of a fight.  If you really wanted to capture a ship you really wanted, you could spend over an hour save-scumming and replaying that battle just to get that ship.  (And later 0.7 releases had some anti-scum features, which meant you needed to save even earlier, about two to four in-game weeks before triggering that named bounty encounter, and wait longer before you can trigger than fight, extending the time per attempt.)

[Serenitis]

Might also be worth mentioning that after the slot machine decided to give you something to board, the option that you'd most likley use (because it was the easiest) was to dock one of your ships to it and do things that way.
And this had a significant chance of failing, which would result in the target ship blowing itself up and very likely take your docked ship along with it.
So, the player would then be compelled to include a number of 'disposable' ships such as shuttles for the sole purpose of gambling with this thing. Or go in completely the opposite direction and drag around the biggest beefiest armourslabs to try and tank the inevitable explosion.

Thematically it was very interesting.
As a game mechanic, it was incredibly ungood. It is dead, and I am glad.

[Megas]

Thematically it was very interesting.
As a game mechanic, it was incredibly ungood. It is dead, and I am glad.

Also, there were no blueprints, so the easiest way to get some ships was to board them.  Tempest was incredibly rare in shops, but were ubiquitous in TT and Lion's Guard fleets, and I was tempted more than once to attack system fleets just to get those rare ships.

If I wanted those ships badly enough, it did not matter how bad the failure was, I reloaded anyway until I succeeded because it was the easiest way to obtain ships that were nearly impossible to find in shops for sale.

[SCC]

I don't think boarding after combat is what people mean, when they ask about boarding, instead of boarding during combat, so how it functioned is hardly important. I just cleared up that the latter was never a thing.