Star Wars at its best: "To boldly go... "

When you unlock them they turn up in the Abilities window ( default key p) under the Legacy tab, from there you can drag them to the quick bar.

You pull the weekly from a terminal in front of of the questgivers/fp-starters i think it requires 6 "points" of starfortress completion, solo mode giving 1 point and heroic giving 2.

The only thing to add here after Steve's very detailed explanation would be to say that you should not bother with augments for anything other than max level gear and that while leveling the best way to get good gear is to run heroics and flashpoints, those will get you blue gear that is a lot better than the quest reward greens or the green components bought at fleet.

Another thing worth mentioning here is that quite a few quests have been hidden and will only show if you tick a box at the lower left of the map screen called "enable exploration missions" ( if i recall correctly).

Other possibility: Pet is dead and needs to be resurrected.

The only gear that still has the dark/light requirements is very old and you don't need it at all. Most of that stuff has absurd DS/LS requirements for the level of gear so you won't even be able to use it until it's outdated anyway. Absolutely NO endgame gear requires dark or light-side alignment at all.

Go do a bunch of lower level heroics and some flashpoints, level 50 is a bit low for Illum.

You have a fairly low item rating for your level, i don't know what planet you have progressed to now but if you do experience trouble you should focus on doing some flashpoints (or heroics with a team) for better gear.

The first priority should be to get to 306 irating, getting set bonuses is the next thing, in the time it takes to level up your gear you will most likely get several pieces of The Victor set, make that up to 306 and use it for alts, it is by far the nicest generic set for almost all toons, the 50% run speed buff is awesome and the 20% heal is nice too.

The Spoon is the mind-killer!

There's a little ui-switch on your screen that has a light and a dark side symbol on them, it sounds like you have clicked the dark one switching allegiance to the dark side, just click the light side icon and you'll stop getting DS points for completing quests and killing mobs.

Dude/Dudette! The main Onslaught story line has nothing to do with force stuff and we just got the start of a Mandalorian internal strife story, there's plenty of non force stuff happening.

Is this supposed to be a 12?

You can clear the field on foot fairly easily, leaving only the final fight that must be done in the mech.