My Vette never puts her guns away. Doesn't affect gameplay at all, but it's annoying when walking around town and such.

Alignment gear is cosmetic. Every piece of gear that's not alignment gated is neutral gear.

I believe you can modify the voice slightly by wearing masks. Just something I heard somewhere.

Yes, in preferences. Under social I think?

EDIT: Ignore me, I read things incorrectly. Posting while feverish for the win.

I have mine set to the highest value (1.0?). It's the time window before an ability finishes that you can queue up the next one. So I can hit Snipe a second time about halfway through the first one activating and it will start charging as soon as the first fires. Setting this to 0 just means you have to mash the button like crazy to avoid standing around doing nothing for a while (really short while, but still!) between shots. Not sure how that's more "fluid".

The Legacy name (surname) has to be unique yes, and is shared between all your characters (on that server).

Chat and UI settings are in "C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\SWTOR\swtor\settings", copy the contents from the file of the character you've set up into new ones. Stupid that you have to do this, but at least it's a work around. Keybindings from what I read on the old boards are stored server side for some totally stupid reason, so can't do the same with those. REALLY, REALLY, REALLY want BioWare to let us copy keybinds between characters.