Developers discuss 27 ships delivered this year, backlog and gold-standard work, and Aurora Mk II. They cover Hull, Railen and Ironclad cargo changes, Perseus, Polaris torpedoes, Salvation and Clipper design, armor in engineering, and the Stingray and Galaxy.
TL;DRThe team credits a planned year of quality of life and content, a larger vehicle team, process changes and support from other teams for the record number of ships, calling it challenging but good.
It's been pretty full on. So at the start of the year, we talked about doing this year of quality of life and content. So we sort of knew we were going to be working at this pace ahead of time. We knew that there was a lot of content to fill, a lot of ships to fill. I think we've done a pretty good job of that. Big thanks to not just the team that works on the ships, but all the supporting teams, like all the people who do the web pages and the marketing art and the trailers and economy side, QA, everybody, because it's all just a big group effort, especially to do it at that scale. It's the most we've ever done in any year. Last year was, I want to say, 23 or so. Even more this year is a big, big improvement. But it's not gone without its challenges, but I think we've done pretty well in there.
Yeah, I'll be honest, I lost count of how many we've done this year. It's been a lot. I think the transition to the monthly releases and everything, it's been full on, but I think we've weathered it pretty well. There's been no secret that we've been expanding the vehicle team a little bit over the last couple of years, and we're starting to, I guess, see some of the benefits of that. I think we've also, or I guess we're still in progress of, changing some of our processes and how we tackle ships, which has allowed us to speed up. Our concept team's grown; everything has grown a bit to allow us to get a little bit more throughput. It has been a challenge, but I think the team are in a pretty good place with what they're able to deliver and the speed and what we can deliver. We've ticked off a few big ones, ticked off a lot of small ones, and it's finding that balance of getting through some of the big ships, but also still being able to deliver a whole bunch of new and exciting ones as well.
Yeah. I mean, some of that stuff, we've got to thank some of the other teams on the other project that helped us with that side of things. But yeah, I think it's been a busy year, but it's been a good year. Everyone's come to the end of it and it's like, yeah, do you know what? I'm very proud of what the team's delivered.
Yeah. And I think some of that stuff as well, to be fair, we can't lay claim to. The plan at the beginning of the year for the year of stability improvements, I think, has meant that more people want to play, and they want more ships to play with. And so the work of some of the other teams outside of the ships helped with that side of things.
TL;DRBacklog ships that depend on missing gameplay features won't be started, so the backlog has shrunk without additions and its pool is slim, leaving a balance between new ships, upgrades and backlog releases.
We've said this a few times, but as you said, it's always someone's first show. When it comes to the backlog ships, quite a few years ago, we decided that we're not just going to release ships that don't have their gameplay loop, or their main gameplay loop. And for a lot of those older backlog ships, they rely on features or gameplay loops that just simply aren't in the game or won't be in the game within the period of time it's going to take to make that vehicle. I can't remember how many backlog ships we did this year, but I know the backlog has gone down because of it. We've not added to it. It's net decreased. So when you look at the ones that are left, there is a sizable proportion of those that fall into that camp of, they require a feature or gameplay loop. And we don't want to start and go through a whole vehicle, get to the end and not be able to release it. We'd rather use that time and resources to do other things. So the backlog pool of ships to pull from is relatively slim. So that has to be balanced against: we've got 11 patches this year, we want to have a ship in every patch, we've got Fleet Week and IAE, which we need to have a lot of ships in. So it's always a back and forth of shiny new content, upgrading older content with gold standards, and then delivering backlogged ships.
TL;DRPreparing for engineering is a huge amount of work: ships must be reworked, tested and tweaked, since older ships were set up differently, and the vehicle design team is currently adjusting the features due in December.
That's been crazy. It's a huge amount of work, and it isn't just, they finish the feature, here's how you do it, off you go. We work with them to do the prototypes for it as well, so we actually test out and implement it on, normally, a test vehicle that gets chosen. But then to go back, because we've been developing ships for eight, nine, ten years at this point, how we've set stuff up over the years has changed as well. So how we have to deconstruct and then reconstruct it to work is different depending on when the ship was released. So on top of having to actually get the ships out and release all the new content, any downtime is spent on a combination of either bug fixing, quality of life for existing ships, or doing all of this feature support. Right now, the entirety of the vehicle design team is off doing tweaks and changes to improve how the features coming out in December feel and play. And we're actively making changes from what we thought it was going to be to what feels better and is a better experience. Literally right now, the team is sat doing it.
Yeah, part of the challenge is even simple things like making sure the ships have got fire extinguishers. We've known that's been coming for a while, and we've been adding them to a lot of our ships as soon as we knew that was coming. But we didn't necessarily know exactly how that system was going to work, and we had no real way of testing it. So really now, a lot of the time, you think, oh yeah, most ships have got them, it's fine, but we still need to go through, test them all, make sure they all work, and realise that, oh, actually, there's a bit of collision that is a tiny bit too big. It looks fine, but we had no way of testing it. And it's those sort of little things that catch us out. On the art side, we're probably in a better place because our side is less impacted by it. I think it's really the design side that's weathering the...
For engineering, there's a lot that goes into it that the players just don't see. We could spend two hours talking about how we do it, but essentially we've been doing this process under the hood over the last 18 months, two years, near enough: basically stripping out the old item pipe system and replacing it with the resource network. That was a lot of manual labor. The way it's been in the game since before 4.0, all the items have basically just automatically connected themselves. That was just to get the system in functional. And now we've been doing the passes of actually physically linking all the items correctly to the relays. So people will have seen, in larger multi-crew ships that have released in the last two years, physical relays, physical items, and it's literally connecting up the resource network for those. So when you have a ship that has an engineering screen, you can see all these connections, you can manage it. And for the initial release, everything will support engineering. It just comes in different stages. Obviously, everything has to work, step one. It's not always a guarantee, let's just be real. But obviously, a single-seater is less work and has fewer requirements than, say, the Polaris. In a single-seater, you have the ability to repair your items through the MFD. And that's our fallback case for a ship that doesn't have physical components: you'll be able to do that gameplay from the cockpit, from an MFD. And then as we go through the ships, physicalizing all the items and adding engineering screens (again, not every ship will have an engineering screen, because it just doesn't make sense), you get more and more of that gameplay unlocked. But it's not like a ship that doesn't have physical components is way better for the gameplay than one that does. They both get impacted the same.
TL;DRA first version of armor is coming as part of engineering when it returns to PTU, and they say it will change combat balance and reward larger crews.
Well, yeah, it's coming too. Engineering's been on Tech Preview for a little while. It was on Tech Preview without armor when they had just finished the code check-in. I was talking to Torsten earlier today. When it returns to PTU, I think tomorrow or the day after, as soon as the build is where it needs to be, armor, the first version of armor, will be in as part of engineering. And it's going to dramatically change the balance between ballistics and lasers and all that stuff, different tiers of ships and everything. It's just fundamentally different how combat's going to play out. You're now going to have this choice: sure, I can use lasers if I want to peel down the shields and then melt the armor, or if I know where the shield generator is and I've got ballistics, I can punch right through that and take those out faster. It's going to be a really interesting challenge and change to combat. The more you know these ships, the more effective you're going to be. And then, of course, continuing changes to the flight model will make that better as time goes on.
It also massively benefits people actually taking larger crews, because if you're trying to fly on your own, you can't go around repairing all the components in the bigger ships. So it encourages you to actually go out with your friends, because you stay in the fight a bit longer. It's going to be a huge shift in the dynamic of the multi-crew ships.
TL;DRGold standard means bringing an existing ship up to the features and functionality it would have if released today, without stylistic changes that remove its core identity; no 2026 list is given.
So gold standard, it's a term that gets thrown around a lot, but for me, it's about: if we were releasing that ship today, making sure it has all the features, all the functionality of a ship that we are releasing that's brand new. So really it's going through and ticking off all of its components, its physical items, the different interactions, making sure the metrics are correct. And it's really just bringing it up to the gameplay experience that a more modern ship would have. It's less about making stylistic changes just because you can. I think there's something to be said for keeping a ship's history. Now, obviously, over the last 10 years or so, things have improved in how we create the ships. So we do tend to go in and make some material changes. We might relight it and do those sort of things. But I don't really want to go in and take away the core DNA of a ship. If we're going that far, then I think we may as well do a Mark II or a Mark III or whatever it might be. But for me, gold standard is just bringing it up to the functionality that it would have if we were releasing it today.
TL;DRA rework is for ships whose existing design doesn't fit their role, gold standard adds missing features, and a Mark II expands a ship that still works; an Aurora gold standard and Mark II are confirmed.
So with reworks versus Mark IIs, it depends on what we're trying to achieve and whether what already exists actually achieves that. So using the 600i as a prime example, just as a talking point. When we made the original 600i, we had a particular vision for how we wanted the interior to be used and laid out. And then as the game evolved, we realized that the interior just doesn't work for what we actually want the ship to be able to do, what we want to achieve, what we want the experience to be while using it. And realistically, if that ship was left in the state that it was, it wouldn't actually fit its role or purpose within the game. So we want to rework something like that. It needs to be taken back and then re-reviewed. And obviously everyone's seen the rework images, the concept board, this entire thread on Spectrum where people are keeping track of everything we've ever said and covered about it. That's the rework. That's when what's there doesn't work. It doesn't need tweaking. It doesn't need things adding. It doesn't need minor changes. It's straight up, it just needs removing and putting back in. The gold standard can sometimes be just bringing something up to scratch. So that's adding, say, the suit locker that's missing, or the weapon rack doesn't work, or other features that help the gameplay experience but don't require us to fundamentally change something about the ship. And then the Mark IIs exist where the Mark I, the original, still works for the role, but we want to make it bigger and better, and we don't want to get rid of the original that's fulfilling that role. So if we talk about the Aurora... oh man, I'm getting in trouble after this. Okay, so people are now hearing the Aurora is getting the gold standard. So what that is: the interior still mostly works, but there are some tweaks needed to make it work with our gameplay loops. But we don't need to strip the entire interior back. It needs a place to put weapons. It needs a place so you can actually walk inside with storage boxes. It needs a fire extinguisher. We don't need to gut the entire ship. So that's why the Aurora is getting its gold standard. It doesn't need a full rework. And we don't want to change what the Aurora is, because the Aurora, it's the Aurora. So that's when a Mark II might come along, because we could do something bigger, better, different, something we're more interested and engaged in, something that allows it to be more than what it was, but is something new.
Yeah, the Aurora Mark II is a thing. I'm not going to go into details about it, but it allows us to take the DNA of what a Mark I is and then expand upon it, make it something different, make it the next generation of itself.
If you look at it compared to the Hornets, the Hornet Mark II and the Mark I side by side, you can tell they are both Anvil Hornets, even though they are stylistically very different. They're the same role, they're the same rough shape, and that's what we want to do with the Mark I Auroras and the Mark II: you look at it and go, that's an Aurora. It does the same roles, but it's the new RSI style.
Primarily, it's a big visual upgrade compared to the Mark Is, but there are so many Mark Is out in people's accounts. It's one of the most iconic Star Citizen ships. We don't want them to just suddenly, one day, boof, all disappear, and then you've all got this new other ship that you perhaps didn't want 10 years ago. It's the same with the Mark I Hornets. We didn't get rid of them and replace everybody's with Mark IIs. Both can coexist.
Yeah, and as one of our iconic starships, it's getting its gold standard to bring it up to what we want that experience to be. And then the Mark II gives us an opportunity to update its visuals to a point that, like I say, it's like the new generation of RSI. So it gives us the option to do both: making the originals function and play how we want, and also doing a full visual overhaul as well. And there'll be people out there who will be like, don't like it, I want to keep the Mark I. And there are people out there who will be like, the Mark I's not for me, I love the Mark II. And that's a good thing: more options.
TL;DRCargo metrics have solidified, with 32 SCU as the largest container, so the Hull A rose from 48 to 64 and the Hull B is going to 512 and arrives in 2026.
Let's start with the Hull series. They were concepted back in 2015 by the great Jim Martin. Back then, they were in everyone's favorite measurement of cargo, freight units. How many FUs is a ship? They had so many FUs, and they got converted to SCUs, and as we brought the Hull series into the game, the Hull C actually, I think, kept its original SCU conversion rate. The Hull A was 48 at concept, but we increased that to 64. Again, cargo metrics in our game solidified over the years. It didn't make sense to do this weird 48, because it didn't fit nicely with the cargo size criteria in the game. And as part of that, we decided that we want 32 SCU containers to be our largest. There's not going to be a magical 64, 128, 256 one. And that has knock-ons for the Hull D and E. But I want to talk about the Hull B first, in that we've been working on that. That was 384 SCU at concept. It's now going to be 512, and it can still land planetside with the cargo fully on, and you can get in and out of it, which is an important thing. There was a lot of finagling to get that to fit.
We don't have images, and I want to be clear, we don't have images because Ben gave them to me and I forgot to load them up. So you can blame me. But essentially, it went from this to like this.
Slightly longer, but still within the same hangar size. It was a little bit of a headache. We tried a lot of different things, but yeah, we got there in the end.
TL;DRThe Railen is going from 320 to 640 and will support standard cargo metrics; they plan to keep the triangle visuals, but how the cargo works isn't settled yet.
So the hologram was based off the model we have in the game at the moment. We are currently working out exactly what we're going to do with the cargo on it. I want to keep the aesthetics there. I want to keep it as close as we can to the original concept. But I also want to make sure that it works. And like I say, we don't want to end up with weird-shaped cargo containers. So we're trying a few different things. We haven't nailed it down in concept yet. In the next couple of weeks, we'll start looking at it, but it will support standard cargo metrics. We will keep the visuals of these triangles. They may be like a frame that clasps around it and holds it and moves out of the way. There may be little end caps. Not sure exactly; it was just a case of we haven't fully resolved that yet. So that's why it's not on there. But that is still the plan.
TL;DRHull D and E capacity is dropping substantially to more reasonable levels, to 6,912 and 12,288 SCU, because the original numbers were impractical; they remain the top bulk carriers and aren't coming in 2026.
Hull D and E owners, sit down, because this is going to sound like bad news, but it's the news. Your cargo capacity is going quite a long way down. So the D, and I've got my notes here, is going down to 6,912 SCU, which is a lot of SCU. And the E is going down to 12,288 SCU. Gut reaction, that's a big drop from, I think, 98,000, and I can't remember what the D was. But for years, people quite rightly said, this is going to be so boring, I don't want to sit and load 3,000-plus 32 SCU containers by hand, or even in an org. Economy-wise, huge concerns. And then performance-wise, also huge concerns. So whilst they have on paper gone down by a big percentage, they are still the absolute top. And we have no plans currently to have any ships that get anywhere near those. I can't think of one that actually beats the Hull C at this point in terms of cargo capacity. So the D and E are still the cream of the crop. Their role remains unchanged as the bulk and super carriers. Their SCU comes down to more reasonable levels.
I'd genuinely be curious to see how long it would take to load a Hull E with the original numbers. Hand on heart, genuinely curious how long it would take to put that many 32 SCUs on it.
Yeah, and we looked at the concept meshes of it, and there are some quirks. They basically add an extra spindle for the D and then for the E. But the scaling's all off, and there was just no way we could even get to those numbers with the current actual cargo metrics. The spindles would have had to quadruple in size. I think proportionally it would look interesting.
TL;DRBoth Ironclad variants' cargo is going up, with figures that may shift slightly before release, because layout changes in whitebox, like moved ladders and a bulkhead, freed space that looked odd left empty.
So that's obviously in production. Again, monthly reports: backlogged ships are always mentioned in there. We don't keep them a secret. Ironclad cargo capacity, both of them are going up. So the base Ironclad was 1,536. That's going up to 2,204. And the Assault's going from 1,152 to 1,440. This is why I have it written down. Again, they may change slightly as we get close to release, but it's that proportional change. Why did that happen?
We reshuffled the inside of it. It was the bulkhead move and changing where the ladders were. As we went through whitebox with the actual layout, we get a good chance to walk around and play and feel what the ship would be like. There were a few changes to the layout and how we were orientating everything. And as things push and pull around a little bit, there's a little bit more space. It made sense to fill it. So we ended up putting a little bit more cargo in there. It's one of those things where there might be a little bit of change. We'll never go down, but we'll sometimes take it up a little. Well, sometimes we might go down; we talked about the Hull D and E. But it made sense from the layout and everything. So it just got a little bit more cargo, because it made sense to add it, and it looked dumb not being there, because it just looked like a gap.
Yeah, I think that's it. When we were looking at it, there were some gaps in the cargo grid, and it's like, if they're justifiable, it's fine. But when there's just a gap, people are just going to shove more cargo in anyway.
Well, it was just because the ladders moved. Originally, there were paths so you could get to the ladders, to the catwalks, but because we moved them out to the side, it just didn't make sense anymore.
TL;DRThe three delayed ships are a crafting-section variant, a ground-vehicle crafting and med-bed base, and a small-to-medium solo crafting ship with a refinery and ground extractors; they slipped because crafting hasn't shipped, and whether crafting arrives in 2026 is left to another team.
There's actually three. So everyone thinks it was the MTC silhouette, but it was actually the MFC, which Ben announced in the MDC video yesterday. So that's the crafting version.
That's the fabricating version. Basically it swaps out the rear section for a crafting section, which opens up. It does this. Just imagine the back. It adds a little bit of shielding, so you can get to your crafter if you're under attack.
So yeah, we've got that. The big Anvil Atlas chassis one is the Auxilia, which is, if you like the Clipper, basically that in an Atlas ground vehicle chassis. So it has a crafting machine, the same dimensions as the one in the Clipper, and a tier two med bed in it, and it looks really cool as well. A nice little forward operating base. One person drives it in and you've got your little respawn and crafting and everything. And then the last one, a lot of people correctly guessed, was a Consolidated Outland ship, and that is, I think, currently called the Forge. I don't know whether we're going to keep that name or not. And you can guess from the name what it does. It's another crafting ship. It's basically a small-to-medium-sized solo ship with a whacking great crafting machine, bigger than the ones people have seen in the Clipper and other ships. And it also has an onboard refinery, so you can refine goods to make the things you are crafting or fabricating. And then an 11th-hour request for it as well was, much like the Pioneer, its super big brother, it also has ground extractors in it, so you can land on a planet and extract the resources to refine, to use for your crafting.
With that one, we were fairly early in the concept when we paused it. The concept's super cool. It's got this amazing slab-front glass canopy to it, full-width flat glass. So it was a really cool-looking ship. Can't wait to pick it back up. But I don't know if we'll end up tweaking it.
Again, like we talked about earlier, we don't want to do things where we're not confident the gameplay is going to be there in time for its release. And it got a few extra things added to it compared to when we started the concept. So that's obviously why we paused it.
Yeah, and it was on the production schedule, but we knew far enough ahead of time that we were going to end up with a ship that didn't have the gameplay, so we pulled it out. I can't remember what we put in its place, but we released something else in its place.
TL;DRNo, the Perseus's outside walkway won't get gravity plates using the current physics-grid method, which has too many bad side effects, though other ways to do it aren't ruled out.
No. Next question. A lot of people love those areas outside of the ships that you can walk around. There are some really fun, annoying bugs and technical consequences that happen as a result of basically abusing the setup to get that to function. And for the Perseus, we really just wanted it for planetside, like, I've landed on a planet in my Perseus, and I've got this nice little balcony on the side of it. I can go out of the rear bridge airlock door and then just survey the land and defend the ship from there.
It's not to say that we won't ever explore gravitational plates on the walkway. It's just not going to be the physics grid method that we currently use, that we used to have on the outside of the Carrack's top, with people clipping themselves onto the back of it and stuff. That's not what that system's intended for, and there are way too many consequences as a result of using it.
TL;DRIn 4.5 the Polaris's back-right bridge station will get torpedo control, but the pilot won't, because the team wants enforced balance between ships and the Polaris torpedoes are far stronger than the Perseus's.
The gun, not the missile. So the back-right station of the Polaris bridge will now have torpedo control as well. You can use it from there. There's still a reason to go down into the depths of the ship to use it, because you then get that 360 camera, and it also has a much larger queue of missiles from there. How many did we settle on? Eight?
So if you want to bankrupt yourself, go down to the basement of the Polaris and queue up eight torpedoes. So yes, we do want to, and people will have it in 4.5. So at least they're on the bridge together doing things. Why not the pilot? Because we want to have some enforced balance there. The Perseus torpedoes are way smaller, way less damage compared to the Polaris ones.
It's like when the Mercury Star Runner owners look at the Clipper and it has a second entrance. It's easy to want every ship to have everything. It's real easy and completely understandable from a player standpoint, let's just be real. You have your favorite ship, and your favorite ship can't do something that some other ship does, and that irks. It just makes your brain itch. This is my favorite ship, and I want my favorite ship to do everything, because it's my favorite and this is the last ship I want to fly. Weirdly, that's not exactly great game design. You don't want everybody to just pick one ship and have that be the only ship they ever fly for the remainder of their time in the game, because that becomes boring. You want choice. You want compelling differences between this ship, that ship, and the other ship. So while there are certainly things that can be done, like adding control to another station on the Polaris to bring certain things into parity, you don't want this forced equalization of all things.
Without even looking at the chat over there, I can already tell they're going, well, the Polaris doesn't have this, why does the Idris pilot get the railgun? And I can see that. It's a different problem, in that if you don't give the pilot of a ship that has a fixed weapon on the front of it control over firing that weapon, it's basically useless. You will never hit anything trying to coordinate between two people with something that requires such accuracy. That doesn't mean that we're happy with how powerful that railgun or beam is and won't look to balance that in the future. But it's not justification for the Polaris pilot or co-pilot. Because we also had this discussion: why don't we just give it to the co-pilot on the Polaris? Well, then no one will sit in the pilot seat, because they'll go sit in the co-pilot seat, because they can fly and then shoot the torpedoes at the same time. So it's all a fun multi-layered thing, and it can seem like, oh, they're just ignoring the problem, but there are lots of things to get into.
Yeah, and I think there are loads of balance things, and loads of things that we've just learned over time that we could improve on. And we're not saying we're never going to go back and make improvements to ships, but these guys are trying to balance them.
TL;DRBen Curtis says the Polaris was deliberately left sparsely signed to feel cold and brutalist, that this was probably wrong, and that changes will come, with some quality-of-life fixes sooner but no schedule and no promise it will match the Perseus's brightness.
There was a little misconception about the Polaris: that we didn't have signage because we didn't know what we were doing, or we didn't have signage for this or the other.
I'll be honest, I didn't want it to be overly signposted. And was that right? Probably not, looking back at it now, because the general feedback has been that people much prefer it. For me, what I was trying to do with the Polaris was, I wanted it to feel like a cold, intimidating, brutalist space that wasn't particularly welcoming and wasn't particularly well signed. Those were all decisions we were making to try and make it feel like somewhere that was a war machine. And that was the vision I was trying to put into it.
Yeah, some of the team did want to put signage on it. And I was like, actually, I don't want to overcook it. Obviously, on top of that, it was the first time that we were... we were learning a lot as we were going. We were building out RSI kits. We were investing a lot of time into the underlying... And obviously with the Polaris, we saw that a lot of the feedback was that people didn't like it: people got lost, they didn't like the lighting, they thought it was bland, and everything else. So we used the Perseus as an opportunity, and the NA team did a fantastic job with it, all credit to those guys. They looked at it and said, what did we learn? What are we going to improve? It's resoundingly been a success. From what I've seen, it's been very, very positively received. Are we going to go back and make changes? We will make changes. When? It's not coming tomorrow. We need a little bit of time to go back and focus on it. We are making some quality of life changes sooner rather than later. But what I don't want to do is knee-jerk react, make loads of changes to it, put it all in and just rush it. I'd rather do it right, have a little bit of time to let the dust settle, look at what was really successful, learn from it, and go in and make those changes. I was trying to do one thing and it turned out people didn't like it. That's fine. That's absolutely fine. And I'd rather have the opportunity to go in and fix it than, actually, no, screw you guys, you're done. So yeah, we will go back. We will make updates to it. Will it be as colourful and bright as the Perseus? Maybe, maybe not. But I want to experiment with it and try it first before I hard commit to, yeah, this is exactly what we're doing.
Yeah. There are some things that we can do relatively quickly. There are other things that take a little bit more time and a little bit more thought. And I just want to make sure that we do it right.
The Polaris and the Zeus. For me, the Polaris was what I'd originally wanted RSI military ships to feel like, and the Zeus was the commercial side, something a little bit more inviting, a little bit more welcoming. And I think with the Perseus, we found that really nice balance between the two. So we just need to go back and sort it.
Yeah, I was going to say, is this my art? It's always Star Kitten, isn't it? Everyone thinks I hate Star Kitten. I don't hate Star Kitten. I just want it to be used and released for a reason. Deliberately. If we have a Star Kitten celebration month, then yeah, of course we do Star Kitten paints. Absolutely. But I don't want to just slap Star Kitten on everything just because everyone likes it. I think it's got to feel right, and just slapping it on the side of a ship for no reason doesn't feel right to me. I'd also love to build out that whole family, that whole brand, a little bit further, so it's not just Star Kitten. There's a whole host of characters.
TL;DRShort term, ships will draw ammo from the cargo grid and can restock, rearm and refuel docked ships from it, while longer term the Perseus's two turret rooms have space reserved for manually loading specific ammo.
Yes. I think we've talked about this before, but I'll go over it again. We have plans, short term, that you'll be able to restock, rearm and refuel from select ships, from the stores that you have loaded onto their cargo grids, if there's another ship in the hangar bay or whatever. We talked about that at CitizenCon Direct. We talk about so much, I'm starting to forget when and where we said stuff. So that's more for rearming and refueling ships that are docked aboard your ship or landed on your ship, but the same will apply to ammo as well. So if you've got ballistic weapons on your ship, short term, it will essentially hoover the ammo out of the cargo grid. Mid to long term, we'll have dedicated space next to those turrets. We left space for this in the Perseus's two turret rooms. They're just arted up with fluff for now. There's all this cool artwork that implies loading of stuff, where you'll then be manually loading the specific ammo type into that area, and that will go to that weapon.
TL;DRThe Salvation's salvage heads are locked and forgiving because it's a starter ship meant to introduce salvage without added complexity, and locked bespoke versions let the team tune them if they underperform.
The main role and purpose of the Salvation is to be an introduction to the entire world of salvage. It's a good entry ship just to get started. And we wanted the heads that came with it specifically to be an easy experience. So it's very forgiving, but obviously the result is that the yield isn't very good. It's just supposed to be, hey, listen, you don't really know what you're doing very well with it yet, so let's make it nice and easy for you. And then if you end up really liking the career and wanting to progress, you move out of the Salvation. So we wanted to be able to very strictly control that experience and not have that head used on other ships, because it's not meant to be a good, optimal head. It's literally a starter. That's it in a nutshell: we don't want to add complexity to a starter. It's the same thing we did with the Golem earlier this year. When we originally talked about them, we talked about them being opposite sides, one salvage...
TL;DRThe Clipper is designed to craft FPS items and small ship items but not vehicles, and the speakers can't give an exact answer because crafting is still in development and what it can craft will probably change.
Obviously we're not the people doing crafting, so I can't give you an exact answer, but it's designed for FPS items and small ship items. Within that world, it's not designed for, I want to make another vehicle; that's clearly not going to fit. It's part of the balance of that ship. Everyone's like, why does it not have a bigger cargo bay? Why doesn't it have a bigger this? It's the jack of all trades, master of none. It has a relatively small cargo grid and a relatively small crafting machine to constrain that.
I feel like there was a pretty good answer to this question in the Q&A that got published alongside it, and that's basically that crafting is still being worked on. We did a segment at CitizenCon Direct on what the very first version of crafting is currently scheduled to look like. It should avail itself of everything in that first version, but then as crafting continues to develop and diversify, the nature of what it can craft will probably change, as the nature of what can be crafted in the game changes. So it's not really an answer that we can give right now.
TL;DRThe Clipper has only two small shields because it is meant to be a jack of all trades with limited balance, small shields can be crafted aboard, and larger ones wouldn't fit without enlarging the ship.
Again, it's the jack of all trades, master of none. When we were doing this ship, it had quite a few internal nicknames for its roles and capabilities, and we were pretty concerned. When people first heard about it, they were like, this is going to break the game. We need to have some form of balance and control on it, and that's why it doesn't have a huge amount of shields. And a benefit of having size one shields is that you can actually craft size one shields. If your shield gets destroyed, you can go craft another one on board and go fix it. Whereas a size two shield probably wouldn't fit. We wouldn't have had space to fit it in. The ship would have got even bigger, taller and longer to fit that.
This is really a question for Rich from the vehicle experience team, who wasn't able to make it at the last minute. We know his answer was balance: it's where it's supposed to be, in line with it being a generalist and not a specific speed demon kind of thing.
TL;DRYes, the Wolf kits will eventually reach in-game UEC shops like earlier weapon kits, though there's no defined exclusivity period and other routes such as loot, crafting and Wikelo are also ways to get such items.
Yes. The Wolf weapon kits are no different than the... let's see, how many have we done? We introduced the first weapon kit with the Idris-T. We introduced that back in 2019, and it didn't come online until May of this year, but it came online. The Heartseeker turret for the Hornet in February is another weapon kit. That is currently not in game. I just had a conversation with Andre and the economy guys: that's going in game in 4.5. The Nova tank Gatling gun and the Scorpius missile turrets were sold exclusively on the store for a period of time to fund the project, and those are in game now. These are absolutely no different from all the things we've literally been doing since 2019 with the Idris-T kit. I'm going to go off on a tangent here: we used to make variants that were just weapon loadouts, like the Hornet Wildfire, the Sabre Comet, and the Starfighter Ion and Inferno. I don't think any of us really felt super good about that. It was where the tech was at the time, and that's what we could do. Now, with this era of weapon kits, we don't have to develop an entire variant just for a loadout thing. And I think that's a better value proposition for our players, quite frankly. But it is still a means of... just like we used to sell those, I'm just going to call them kind of crappy weapon loadout variants, to fund the project, now we do these instead. And like everything, they'll go into the game. I don't know what the period of exclusivity is, but it's not hard and defined. It's like the Heartseeker turrets going in now. We've done weapon kits for a while now, and they all make it into the game eventually. So no worries there.
Can I just mention one Wolf thing? I know the paints were a little bit broken when they went out. It hurt me, but it was either that or broken damage, and it was deemed that we wanted the ship to function properly, even if the paints were a little bit broken. The yellow lines over the front retros just crushed me. But it's been fixed. It was fixed within a few hours of the build going out; it was just too late for us to fix for the release.
And yes, chat is reminding me: eventually there'll be a way to get the railgun from the Idris-M. I think the big mistake is that everybody assumes they go into UEC shops, and that's never been what's been said. They will be attainable in-game. For a long time, UEC shops were the only way we could do that. But now loot is diversifying. People have just seen the physicalization of helmets and stuff like this. There are going to be certain things that you can only get through loot. Crafting is somewhere around the corner; that will be another way to attain these things in-game. And Wikelo, everybody's favorite bunny, which some people online, not completely incorrectly, have dubbed crafting light, when it works. All of these are ways to acquire things in game. It's not just automatically UEC shops. That said, the Wolf kits will eventually be in UEC shops. I'm just making the point that it's not automatically that.
TL;DRJohn Crewe fixed a ground-vehicle category display bug, which led to a wider clean-up of inconsistent categories, including removing ground as a career, and an updated Shipyard is planned for 2026.
I had a bug come across my desk for ground vehicles displaying as 'ground ground', and it annoyed me immensely. So I went into our tools to have a look at it and just discovered this web of broken stuff. And as you do, you start pulling at the thread, fixing one thing, and then you realize the inconsistencies. So we went through and aligned them all. We got rid of ground as a career, because whose career is ground? So all the combat vehicles that are ground vehicles are now combat with their subclassification. And that morphed into re-looking at them all: light, medium, heavy freight. We also realigned some of the categories, because they were done five-plus years ago, when we didn't have the range of cargo ships we have in game now. So we've normalized that out to new numbers. I can't remember if we've published that, or if it's something we're going to do in Shipyard.
No, we are. It's one of those things: you and I did the Shipyard back in 2016, 2017, and every year we say it's time to update it. We are going to find time to do an updated Shipyard in 2026. That's another thing that's coming in 2026. It's absolutely needed.
I had to make a post last week. One of the things I'm in charge of is this massive store audit that we're doing. We've been slowly working out definitions for all the different roles and types and adding them to the website. I made an update to, I can't even remember what ship it was, and I removed part of a definition that I didn't mean to remove. That's not an actual change. That's me trying to do a good thing and messing up.
Yes. So the actual parasite stuff, for being able to take control of the larger ship and flight control, we've actually got the first playable coming up very soon. They've used a prototype on existing ships, but the Ironclad and the command module have been built with it in mind. There are slight tweaks needed for them to use it, but the first playable's coming up soon, and we're currently on track to have it come out with the actual release of the Ironclad.
TL;DRPowerful headlights performed badly and blinded other ships, so the team plans a light-amplification system called LAMP for cockpit glass to help night navigation, currently in early stages with no release date.
I think it depends what context we're talking about, because if the practical purpose of them is the same reason people wanted really, really powerful headlights and lights on the ship, it's to help them navigate in the dark, so it's easier to land on dark surfaces. When we kept extending the range of the headlights, it didn't work well. It was really unperformant, and when you got a group of ships together and they were all pointing at each other, it was impossible to see anything. It was like driving down the highway with everyone's high beams on. It was too much. But people need a way to actually navigate in the dark; absolutely, that's something that's needed. So we do have plans for a solution. It's a system called LAMP. I didn't pick the name. The entire purpose is light amplification, to let people fly and navigate at night. It's currently in early stages. We don't know exactly when it's going to be going out, but what it does is put light amplification on all of the canopy glass, so you'll actually be able to see what you're doing in the dark.
Carrack, yes, because one of the promised features of that ship was the repair room, which at the time was pretty undefined, but now repair is sort of like crafting: crafting your own small items, and you can repair adjacent to it. And we were talking about the Aquila. We can't remember that being a thing for it. If someone has some hard evidence of that being a thing, put it in chat or comments or a Spectrum thread. Tag me on Spectrum.
We spent a good hour today digging through every single bit of the old marketing material for every generation of it and couldn't find a thing about it on the Aquila. If anyone has got anything on it, just tag me and John on Spectrum.
TL;DRShips are already set up to support names, but the exterior visuals don't satisfy the artists and the reservation process is very manual, so it needs feature work and a more scalable approach, with no timeline given.
From a vehicle content point of view, there are two things there. Since we introduced vehicle naming and serials with the Hercules and a slew of other ships, we've done the setup on all the ships to support having names. So anything in the last three or four years has the setup for it. At least from an art point of view, we're not particularly happy with how it works, because it's basically a fixed-size, maximum 32-character string that goes on the exterior of the vehicle. If you name your ship 'B', it's the same size B as if you had 32 Bs in a line, so it doesn't look great. It doesn't react to the paints. We get to pick the font and the color in the current system. So if you've got a black hull ship with a white font, it looks great on the default. Put a white paint on it, and it doesn't react to that. We need to enhance that: either the paints have an override for the serial numbers and colors, or the serials do some magic to detect that. And we also want to highlight them with lighting. Like you see on the Enterprise, it has little lights that illuminate the name and the serial number. And we need that to work with the dynamic scaling side of it as well. So from a content side, it works, but we're not particularly happy with it. There's also a huge amount of work on the platform side that they would need to answer for. I know it's a hugely manual process, because so many people own so many ships, and because they're unique names, they do it in a wave system. So you need to work out the owners of every ship, divide them into waves, give each wave time, and like I say, it's manual, and then it has to be approved, because people on the internet put naughty words on the outside of their spaceships. Basically it needs feature work. We can do it, but it's a huge amount of manual work.
It just needs feature work. We set all the ships up. There's some polish and niceties, we would like to improve the visuals, but then it's more on the feature side.
I'll say this so that if somebody gets angry, they can just come to me. The Battlecruiser, for those of you who don't know, is our last concept. It's from the original crowdfunding campaign. We didn't do any concept ships this year. It's our intention to never do another concept ship again, other than the Battlecruiser. And when it comes, being a giant military-style thing, if only there were a giant military-style event that would be appropriate to reveal such things, that's probably where you might expect to learn more about it. And definitely not here, where we've already spilled the beans on too much of the 2026 schedule.
No. Why does there have to be a limit? If you think of a matrix of all the different sizes and manufacturers, we haven't even filled one of every size and role. We just got our salvage starter, one of them. And we don't want just one in most of the slots, because people want the choice, right? Some people don't like RSI, some people don't like Drake, some people don't like Origin. We want people to have options, and we haven't even filled out the basic matrix yet.
TL;DRSeparating docking from hangar requests would be welcome and is on the feature request list, but it's a priority call with no commitment, and the speakers suggest the command module team might fit it in.
Yeah, it'd be cool. We should probably talk with the people doing the command module work, because they might be able to squeeze that in with their work. And actually, there's a fun backstory that goes with the Apollo. Probably 50-50 of people realise the back ramp and opening of the Apollo is very small. That's because it's a docking collar, both a small one and a big one, but it doesn't function in game because of that bug. I told the team not to set it up as a docking collar, because that would have meant that every time you came to land somewhere, instead of a medium hangar, the Apollo would always try to do the docking. So that's why the Apollo has this small entrance: it has a built-in docking collar to dock to other ships and stations in the future, when we have the ability to split that up properly. Not because I wanted to stop being crammed in the back of it, which is also another...
TL;DRAI blades are still wanted and intended, as part of keeping solo players supported, but the speakers say the current implementation isn't how blades will eventually work and give no timing.
It's not really for this team to discuss. But yes, still wanted, still intended. You might have seen some struggle with the MDC recently. What is a PDT but an AI blade-controlled turret? You're seeing, live and in real time, some of the limitations of the current implementation. It's still intended. It's still the thing. It's ships like the Clipper, the generalist. It is our intention never to leave solo players behind. Yes, it is a massively multiplayer online universe. Yes, you'll always be able to do more with friends and colleagues and allies. But there should be a place for people who don't want to do any of that. We're very passionate about that. That is still at the core of our intention for this game, and things like AI blades, things like the NPC crews we used to talk a lot about, all of that stuff was designed for that. All things in their time.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of people on Spectrum and Reddit talking about, oh well, they've got the flight blades and the AI blades, surely it's easy to just get the rest of it in. But the way we've had to implement them just isn't how blades are going to have to work. We've had to use our current systems in interesting ways to get them to function the way they are. And it's just not how blades are going to be.
TL;DRHuckaby says this is a mission-team matter and that a Missions 2.0 refactor, long planned, should enable rewards beyond credits and the kind of multi-crew payoffs asked about, though he gives no specifics or date.
Again, this is not one for the vehicle content team, but if you follow along with the monthly reports, you'll see occasional mentions of Missions 2.0. I'm going to sound a little like a broken record here: it's another refactoring of the entire mission system in order to do the things that we all wanted to do. For years, missions weren't able to give you rewards. You couldn't complete a mission and get anything other than credits for it. It's just one of the challenges of running a live environment during the development of our game. Most games get to do all this secretly. You would never get a mission system that doesn't have things like being able to give you an item as a reward. The mission system that they're currently working on is the thing that we've been speccing out for years. It's the thing that will unlock incredibly dedicated developers like Elliot Maltby and Yoran and all the members of the mission team. They are chomping at the bit. They want this new system too, so that they can do exactly the kinds of things that you're talking about. It's just another way Star Citizen will continue to evolve. And after a year that's been relatively dry on features, and we knew it would be (I sat out here for two, three hours with Benoit at the beginning of the year saying that), the 2026 schedule should be... I want to say this as honestly and as candidly as I can. I'm using the words 'should be' because the other maxim that I run into the ground is that the only constant in game development is change. It should be a marked change from 2025 as far as feature work goes. It won't be the relentless pace of 2023 and 2024 as far as broken, half-finished things. But we took this year to get those proverbial ducks in a row and develop these things further along. So you'll see engineering on the horizon, then the crafting tech preview after that, and then hopefully all on its way to base building, with a whole host of things like scanning and radar improvements in between. It is everybody's hope that 2026 is going to have a lot more stuff like that, including mission system work.
TL;DRHuckaby says there is no "normal" schedule and it won't return to earlier levels, but with more feature work coming next year they should be able to do more shows.
There are no normal SCLs or ISCs. Yes. Again, I think I said it earlier: not back to the 2024 schedule, not back to the 2015 schedule where I was doing five shows a week, but I want to find more ways to get back to this more often. The reason for the change this year was elucidated back in February in that show with Benoit, but it was also big changes in my role here internally and my responsibilities. We're at the point now where we can go back, and with feature work coming online, we should be able to tell more stories. It's hard because, quite frankly, when you're doing content, you don't want to spoil the content. If we had kept doing an ISC every single week on every single aspect of Dark Territory and Align and Mine, there would have been no discovery for anybody whatsoever. We just really try to avoid that. We're a game company. A lot of people are working to make this tremendous content, and they would like you to experience it in game. And I agree with that. So we scaled the shows back. But with more feature work coming online next year, we should be able to spike the shows up a bit. And we're still kicking around ideas for different kinds of shows we can do.
TL;DRHuckaby gives no date, saying not every ship will be sold in UEC shops and that capital ships will instead be attainable in-game through means like crafting, Wikelo and reputation.
That goes back to the answer I gave earlier today. Not every ship is going to UEC shops. It's just not. These ships will be attainable in-game. These ships will be earnable in-game. That's not the same as every ship going into a store. He'll forgive me if I speak on his behalf, but I've literally heard him say these words: it's like the idea that you go into a Hertz rental car place and rent a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. It just makes the brain itch. There should be other ways. That's where crafting comes in. That's where, to an extent at the moment, Wikelo comes in. And then other ways: reputation gains and stuff like that. There'll be many more ways for you to attain these ships other than just UEC. It's frankly boring, not particularly interesting, and just not diegetic with the universe we're building to put every single thing into a UEC shop. The idea that you go to New Deal and pick up an Idris is kind of silly. So we're finding other ways, but they will all be attainable in game, one way or another, or in multiple ways.
We were talking about that on the show I had Simon and Phil on earlier. They committed to doing that on that ship. And if I'm misremembering and they didn't, I'm going to say they did right now. But yes, again, it's one of those things: there's not a human being here who doesn't want it.
That's still the plan as far as I'm aware. Again, that's not really a vehicle thing. That's a game-wide ammo types question for the gameplay system designers.
That's the work of Rich's team. They've done several passes making improvements to them over the years. They've gotten better, but I don't think anybody's going to sit here and tell you they're where everybody wants them to be.
I'm totally panicking, but this is the Stingray. Sorry, I was just making sure it wasn't a working title, because we have some quite interesting working titles.
We listed like 11 manufacturers. That's not only 11 ships. We did 27 ships this year. I can't remember off the top of my head how many ships next year, but it's close.