Ships

LAMP was limited to fighters because static canopies have a linkage issue; it's solvable and wanted on every vehicle, but needs a way to avoid reauthoring many ships and still has to be planned.

Selling or deleting earned ships is technically possible with the new entitlement and economy systems, but whether to do it is ultimately a design and creative question.

Beausejour says ship cleanup is one thing being looked at: the system seems to work but may be misconfigured in some areas, letting ships pile up, and more entities make servers do more work.

The 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.

Backlog 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.

Preparing 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.

Gold 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.

The AI module (blade) technology already works and is used on some capital ships, turrets and ATCs, with the AI side largely ready and the remaining work being how players obtain and use blades.

The new flight feature stays in Squadron 42 for now because bringing it to the PU means retuning every ship and component, multiplayer testing and finishing the UI, and it will likely be tested with Evocati before wider release.

The Mercury's fuel tank was enlarged because the ship had grown more powerful than its tank, and this rebalanced it against comparable ships, whereas lowering consumption would have left an outlier and affected thrusters across ships.

The AR door finder is aimed at new players, who can find ship doors confusing, and veterans can turn it off; the speakers see making the game more accessible as a long-term benefit.

Kirk Tome says seat height adjustment is hard because the HUD, the IK on the controls and shared entry animations would all need changes, with the dynamic HUD the biggest tech challenge, though all of it is solvable with time.

A rework scraps almost everything and rebuilds a ship from scratch, while an improvement targets one area, such as a cockpit interior or adding hatches for components, without rebuilding the whole ship.

They want more starter ships long term and like the Dragonfly idea, but already-sold ships come first and design questions like exposure and quantum travel remain, so it may take a while.

Major alien civilizations are roughly equal in tech level, each with its own specialties, so alien components could differ in parameters rather than being always better, and standardised component sizes let them fit UEE ships.

The Hornet was the starter ship in Wing Commander, where it was a light fighter, but in Star Citizen its turret makes it feel like a medium fighter; many designs nod to historical aircraft.

Travis Day says design and production processes evolve constantly, citing ship pipeline changes like ship paint and a planned procedural damage system, and Darian Vorlick says producers keep streamlining their own processes too.

Whether more small and medium ships come depends on the game's design; several one-to-three-seat ships are already coming, and gaps may show up as the Persistent Universe fills out.

Swapping parts like coolers and avionics already works; modularity adds swapping whole internal rooms for role variants, and computer components can also change things like targeting.

The hangar patch adds the new Avenger and Cutlass to walk around in, plus a space crab, jellyfish and a sucker fish, and some UEC to test client-side persistence; the ships aren't PBR yet.

Chris Roberts says eight Constellations versus eight Hornets might be closer than expected, and that matchmaking will offer options like point budgets per ship and same-ship-only matches, with illustrative numbers only.

Players should generally need to own ships to fly them in the Dogfighting Module, but early on only one or two ships, such as a test Hornet, may be flyable.