Bought the Alternity Convoys or plan to, and want to know a bit about the character bio and back-story, but can't read Japanese?

Well, the tfwiki.net have posted up a translation:

http://tfwiki.net/wiki/From_Here_to_Alternity/src

It's a whole new 'story universe' for the Alternity series, and there are a few weird bits in there. One bit that I didn't like is that they could evolved into celestial beings in (just) 900,000 years, but in all previous series, 4 million years have passed with no such changes.