10 for the Chairman Episode 17 . April 21st, 2014

Navigation in general is based on, you'll bring up a nav... when you're in a system, you'll have a system view as navigation, and in your system view, you'll navigate to different points of interest.So in the old Wing Commander/Privateer model, we would call them nav points, but a nav point could be a planet that you're going to orbit around to land, or a nav point could be a jump point, or a nav point could be an asteroid field that you're gonna go and explore to see if you can mine.What happens in general is that you have pre-defined nav points, think of it like you get your car with a GPS and the GPS already has some of the roads that you can find, and in your nav computer, you'll have pre-defined nav points for most of the know systems that are well trodden, and what will happen is you can select them then warp to that area, which is sort of like auto-pilot which was in the Wing Commander games and Privateer, and that's the equivalent of going up to .2 of the speed of light.I've mentioned before, you can never go faster than light inside the system. The only way you can go faster than light is going through a jump point which is really a fold in time and space. But that's the fast travel inside the system, then you get pulled out of warp space, .2 speed of light, as you get close to another body or another ship, because at those kind of velocities, there's not way that your ship's computer can make corrections quickly enough to avoid a collision. So as you start to get close to something that there could be collision potential, it pulls you out of that warp speed. You essentially will select these points to jump to.Now of course you could just fly in that direction, and in some cases this is where astrogation and navigation comes into it, more exploring, you can map areas of a system. So there may be areas of a system that aren't mapped, but maybe there's an asteroid field or a derelict spaceship or something, and as you fly around with a long range scanner, you start to map things. As points of interest come in that you would map, that would create a new nav point on your nav computer, and you could send that to your friends, your organization, or potentially you could sell some nav points that you've charted. Think of it very much like in the old days, where they were mapping coasts or a continent, and the old explorers would go around and do cartography to map out the new world.So we've built that in, and that's kind of how the navigation/astrogation will happen.In terms of traveling from one side of the galaxy to the other side, you have to travel in system, go to a jump point, know that the jump point goes to the other system, make the jump, and then in the next system, fly to the next jump point you want to go through, and so on and so on. Alright, I hope that helps.

Independent of fly-by-wire? In all our spaceships you will always be under the control of the Intelligent Flight Control System, which is basically our fly-by-wire, and I actually would challenge anyone to be able to fly these ships without having some computer assistance, because they've got multiple thrusters and there's a lot of... The simulation right now is actually incredibly accurate and is very dependent on the center of mass, and everything else. So there's a lot of thrusters firing.If you don't have an optimal center of mass, some thrusters will be firing to compensate for lateral or angular movement that you don't want to achieve in the movement that you're going for. What we have, we actually demoed it at the PAX East event that we just did, and it is gonna be part of the Dogfighting Module, so everyone will get to play it.The short answer to this question is actually yes, all these things will be there, although IFCS is what delivers it for you, is that you will be able to fly normally, which is the Wing Commander style where the computer tries to align your velocity with wherever you're pointing your nose, and it will do it as quickly as the thrusters will allow it to do, within the limits of the amount of g's you can pull.But, you can enter decoupled mode, when you're flying around, and in decoupled mode you have two things you can do.You can just change your orientation. That means in decoupled mode, whatever velocity you had when you entered it maintains and you keep moving in that way, and when you start to change your pitch, or roll, or yaw, it's just changing the orientation of your ship, it's not changing your linear velocity vector.And then we have the strafe mode of decoupled mode, and that is allowing you to go left, go right, go up, go down, go forward, go back.As we demoed, and I think by the time you've seen this, there will have been a demo that we will have shown already that shows all those different aspects. A bit more in depth demo of all the features that will be in the dogfighting, and some of the stuff we didn't get to show at the PAX East event, because we had a few technical glitches. Mainly because we're showing stuff way, way earlier than we would normally, therefore you're a little at the mercy of the gremlins.There you go, yes, 6 degrees of freedom, and you can change your orientation, you can strafe, all the rest of the stuff.I think it's gonna add a lot to the combat, and I'm really curious to see, once we start doing it, as people develop their fight styles, what works, what doesn't work, what do people prefer, it will be very cool.

Well we listen to all you guys, we read the forums, and when things make sense to us.It's not really a democracy in terms of "There's a bunch of people saying this, so we should do it," it's more that "someone's making a good point," alright, we'll listen to that. And that's the value of the community, and I think what's really making Star Citizen great. Then we enact it. So we're, for instance, making some changes to the Constellation, for better cargo access, loading/unloading, and also using the Merlin fighter so they're not interfering with each other and not blocking each other. Also moving up living quarters closer to the cockpit.Those were all things that were discussed by the community, and we're like "yeah, that makes a lot of sense," and we can see those problems. The 300i, I'm not quite sure what people were discussing in the community, but we're making some changes 'cause it's getting another pass.As you've seen, the Hornet has continually had improvements. The cockpit, people used to complain that there wasn't enough visibility, well actually the seat's a little higher now, the struts are a lot thinner, there's a lot more detail in them too, so you really feel the high fidelity of the environment that we're going for.And we're doing the same for the 300i, it needs a bit of love and an up-res. So we're definitely up-resing the cockpit, and we've up-resed the exterior.And the one last thing that we've really got to figure out is the cargo, 'cause there's not a lot of space for cargo in the design even though it's meant to be able to pull some cargo. We're in the process of that, I think we're leaning towards being able to have an attachable cargo module on the outside, but that's still in the works.

Quite well is the answer actually. So we're actually in the process modeling this in the engine right now. So we're sort of doing some revisions to the initial concept, because the concept was one of the more simplistic or not as well developed concepts as some of our other ones.I think you guys are gonna like it, it's definitely gonna have a combination between a Formula 1 car and an exotic Ferrari or something. We're doing some really cool stuff, it's definitely something you'll want to have in your hangar. And I'm looking forward to sharing some of that with you in the future, and putting it in your guy's hangar.The M50 interceptor is probably not too far off in the future, that doesn't mean it's next week though, so I don't want to have threads on the forums going "CIG lied, M50 isn't this week," because it takes a bit of time. But it's probably one of the next ships that we'll have up, which will be pretty cool.

Well, good question. You're going to have it very soon, The Dogfighting Module is essentially that.It's the first iteration of Arena Commander, which is the in-fiction gamesimulation software that all pilots can use to practice, to train themselves. You don't have to be fighting against other players, you can be fighting against AI, or just flying around to learn the controls. And ultimately you could do some e-sports with it, have a competition.So really Arena Commander's in there to do a lot of the practicing, but in Squadron 42, we're also setting up a way to break you in on the ships, show you how to use them, in the first few missions.Basically, under the fictional context, you've mustered onto the ship, it's your first couple of missions out as a pilot on the front lines, and you're flying a slightly different ship than you may have trained on, so your wing leader's saying "this is what you do in the Hornet."But we didn't really want to do really boring tutorial missions in Squadron 42, because that always feels like busy work. We'd rather get you in there and get you into the action pretty quickly. Which was very much what Wing Commander did. I think in the very first mission of Wing Commander, you fought some Kilwrathi. Not very tough ones, but right on your first mission.

We're setting up Star Citizen much like the real world.We actually do have, whether you want to call it money sinks, I call it running costs, of things like repairing your ship, keeping up to date, we have taxes in the form of landing fees or trade tariffs depending on where you are.So if you're in a very state-regulated area, there's a lot of law enforcement, well then yeah, it costs a bit more to do business there, because you're paying for the protection essentially.There is an equivalent of consumables because we have fuel. You can go harvest your own fuel, or you may not have time, so you may just pay to refuel when you're down on a planet. But in general will cost you to operate, as well as things you may earn.So our hope is that we're not going to have wild inflation, because we have consumption as well as production. And whether that consumption and production are properly balanced, well that's part of the challenge of the economy system that we're building.We're sort of building a whole, stand alone, simulator that would interface to our persistent universe server, and we can have a meta view of the galaxy and that's actually not that far from us playing with it internally, so at that point, I could tell you. But essentially, we are trying to, in a rough way, simulate what happens in the real world.In the more unregulated areas, there aren't so many dues, or taxes, or duties, and so you can have a better margin when you're selling. The risk is that you may get attacked and you won't get the same level of protection that you would in the inner systems.