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Stick and Rudder: The best bits of Star Citizen's 24-hour livestream
There are livestreams, and then there are livestreams, and Star Citizen's 24-hour marathon that concluded yesterday was a prime example of the latter. The event was crammed full of developer roundtables, celebrity cameos, and enough internet spaceship shenanigans to keep me watching for far longer than I originally intended. Cloud Imperium revealed several new spacecraft, along with additional stretch goals that blew my mind, plenty of slickly produced videos, concept art, and more.
Star Citizen's Aurora revealed, Roberts explains further crowdfunding goals
Star Citizen is still fairly early in its development stage, but at least one in-game asset has now officially passed through the entire design process. That element is the Aurora, which is Star Citizen's base ship and one that most players will use to begin their spacefaring careers. The Aurora was designed by Star Wars and Star Trek concept artist Ryan Church. The Star Citizen website is now chock-full of in-engine images and in-character design specs. Cloud Imperium is also running a limited promotion focused on a special model Aurora called the LX. CEO Chris Roberts explains the reasoning behind another fundraising initiative over and above his famously successful Kickstarter campaign. "Star Citizen is going to cost approximately $20 million to make. We have this covered already between the incredible funding we've received from you and the commitments from investors," he says. "But here's the truth: I've been holding off on closing investors because your commitment means we won't need as much money as we originally expected. Every dollar we make from crowdfunding means one less we'll take from outside investors." If you're not up to pledging for the spiffy new Aurora, though, don't worry. "You will be able to earn credits to buy this ship in game once we go live," Roberts writes. "So please do not feel obligated to do anything. Everyone has given more than enough. This is purely a "for the fun" sale/event to hopefully push our funding along." [Thanks Eric for the tip!]
Star Citizen cargo ship boasts functioning interior, detachable fighter
Remember those old ship blueprints that came folded in your Wing Commander box circa 1991? No? Well, get off our lawn. Assuming you do remember them, or assuming you're as excited as we are about Chris Roberts' new Star Citizen space sim, you'll probably get a kick out of some images just released on the official site. The site has a preview interview and accompanying concept gallery that features a player ship called the Constellation Mark III. There are plenty of schematic views, lore-appropriate statistics, and of course renders of both the interior and exterior of the craft. Yep, apparently that answers the question as to whether or not we'll be able to walk around inside some of Star Citizen's ships, as many of the renders show off everything from the cockpit to living quarters to various observation decks and stations. Oh, did we mention that the Constellation boasts its own detachable star fighter? Roberts also puts to rest any notions of Star Citizen being a typical combat-only shooter. One of his goals is to let you actually look at the cargo in your ship's hold while you're in space. "There's a big focus on simulating and showing everything that you would imagine to be inside and functioning on a spaceship in Star Citizen," he explains. "So if you're hauling it you should see it in your hold (if you can walk back into your hold), if you activate a system, you should see your pilot avatar lean over and switch it on, and so on." The images come courtesy of Ryan Church, a familiar name to sci-fi geeks thanks to his concept art work on the Star Wars prequels. [Thanks to Eric for the tip!]%Gallery-171150%
