As a scientist I have to ask: You mentioned collaborations with actual scientists before – could you share something about that process? In which parts were they involved? did you use their input to explain your more fantasy elements or did you change the lore to accommodate science? How do you keep the balance between believable scientific explanation and enjoyable & interesting 'fantasy' regarding Star Citizen technology?asked by DocAndy

Recently when we did work on the Star Map we definitely did a talk to a handful of astrophysicists input on the actual scientific breakdown of certain systems of habitable zones, what kind of planets could end up where based on which kind of star and details like that are very important for us so that there is a scientific backbone to the Star Map to what you're going to see and how might of effect you know that habitability of certain worlds or not to a certain degree.I know Will has actually gone out and tracked down some young astrophysicists willing to help us kind of vet all these systems and it's definitely a process we're in the middle of to make sure that everything is you know, has a scientific footing to it that's for sure.

Yeah, there's a new organization called the, I'm going to mess up this name, the Science and Entertainment Exchange which specializes in hooking up people who work in the entertainment industry with scientists who donate their time to give scientific advice just out of the sheer desire to make entertainment more scientifically accurate. So we worked with them as well as contacting people on our own and it's a real kind of fun balance between accuracy and the fantasy elements and a lot of times it just comes down to does it feel right?Which is kind of a thing when you're striking that balance between what is fun because sometimes real hard science facts can be either like, stop you from doing something that would be otherwise really fun, it can also be so crazy that it doesn't feel right when you hear it like there's this weird thing that you get too accurate and it goes against what people's common expectations are and so you have to say, alright even if this is true, it's going to really confuse people to do it that way.

Make for bad gameplayWW: And then you're going to have to explain it to people, "Oh but this is scientifically accurate even though it feels very wrong". So there's all these things, it's been kind of a fun process to work with them and yeah, hopefully we'll be releasing further updates on the Star Map where we get to unveil some more of the hard numbers that we're using in the background so that you can actually see exact distances and stuff and then you know, still, those are still going to be chances and fleshed out more as we talk more with designers when we actually get ships flying in more and more of these systems were going to have to make further adjustments. So a lot of back and forth, give and take on that.