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Talk to me about the transport system.

TL;DRTransport is a ground-up rebuild of transit for server meshing; one link and hangars work internally, and it plans a Tech Preview for Area18 before wider rollout, with no dates.

Benoit BeausejourChief Technology Officer

So transit was problematic, wasn't designed for server meshing. And so transport is a complete rebuild of the transit system, but using server meshing native approaches for how different pieces are going to manage elements that are streamed out and streamed in. We're also moving away from some previous misconceptions that were put into the transit system. For example, one of them was responsible for trains going into space. We don't want trains to go into space. Well, I mean, unless we do a space elevator. Astro train would be great. So the state of transport, right? So at the end of last year...

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

Sorry, I'm going to pause. What's included in transport? What are we talking about?

Benoit BeausejourChief Technology Officer

Transit and transport manage elevators, in-ship elevators, trains, anything that has to move when you press a button and you call it. So it's a network of carriages, peripherals and gateways. So you take an elevator to go to your hangar, that's transit. You take a tram. Anything that's automated, anything that moves you not under your control. And he's the one moving the carriages. So he needs to deal with carriages being streamed out, prediction for that stuff. So transport is a rebuild of the original transit, which has been, as we talked about, problematic. So the state of transport at this point is it's functional. So the team at the end of last year actually completed the first transport link, and we tested this internally with our QA teams extensively at this point: all of the New Babbage habs links. So we took one link in the universe, that one, and we tested the crap out of it. That's a static link. When I say static, it means the two points that the elevator goes to always exist. So we know that works. Then the state at the moment is we also support hangars. So these are dynamic gateways, because if you're online and you're at the location, your hangar spawns there. That's a dynamic gateway. If you leave, that gateway disappears. So the system needs to deal with dynamic gateways. The previous system kind of did, and that bit was the piece that wasn't great. And so we've got internally at the moment New Babbage, we've got hangars and habs. So the state of transport now is the team is working at converting all of Area18. So we're talking habs, hangars, transit trains, all of Area18 to the transport system. So we're going to go to Tech Preview with that. That's our plan. And the reason why we need to go to Tech Preview is because we need players. We've tested this internally. We can't muster as many players as we want. So we're going to see if you guys want to come and help us out, test the new transit for real on a Tech Preview to validate all the assumptions that are in the system.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

So we're going to launch a Tech Preview and ask people to just come and ride the elevators, come and ride the trams, and their hangars.

Benoit BeausejourChief Technology Officer

And hope nobody dies. No trains in space. No doors opening to nothingness. That'd be great. No passing through the floors in the carriages. And so after a Tech Preview, if everything is validated... There's one thing, too, we want to try to avoid: the train prediction where the train says it arrives in one million and sixty seconds, which obviously we hope to fix. So after Tech Preview, we're going to scale this out to every landing zone, and we're going to see which patch this will land in. But at that point, we hope to bring transport in and completely deprecate the transit system from the game and nuke it from orbit. We don't give dates. Best effort, but it's looking good. This Tech Preview is going to be where we evaluate really where we're at with scale, because the issues of transit typically come up with scale most of the time.

Star Citizen Live›Tech Talk with Benoit Beausejour·
Published on this date.5 Feb 2026