Letter from the Chairman: $21 Million!

I’m proud to announce that the Star Citizen community has brought us to $21 million in crowd funding just shy of our first anniversary! Your support is now allowing the project to expand on ideas in ways we didn’t originally think possible. Every additional pledge makes Star Citizen a better experience. At the $21 million, you unlock the full salvage mechanic, which allows us to produce the assets needed to make salvaging an in-depth game mechanic akin to exploration or piracy!

• Salvage Mechanic: Salvage isn’t an aside: it’s a career, with its own mechanic, story tie-ins and universe-shaping endgames. Search the galaxy for a host of valuable and interesting secrets using both the flight and FPS components. Discover the secrets of the ancient Hadesians, locate valuable components and cargo… or go down in history the first to make contact an entirely new alien race!

In addition, we are unlocking a new $23 million goal: the addition of a Xi’an Scout as a playable asset in the game. We’ve recently begun putting together concept art of Xi’an worlds, which got us thinking about the game’s Xi’an ships: how can we make them play differently than the standard human ships? We have a few ideas and with this stretch goal we can put them into the game! In addition to alien designs and interfaces, the Xi’an craft will feature a totally different maneuvering system.

Xi’an ship design will be focused on a vertical aesthetic and maneuvering jets that can combine to thrust in multiple directions. Gimbaled, larger-than-normal thrusters sit on the four points of a star in the centerline, allowing each thruster unobstructed hemispherical coverage. The Xi’an scout can rotate on all axes and direct four thrusters to the rear or front! Because of this configuration the Xi’an ship has superb linear maneuvering abilities on all axes. This extra maneuverability comes at a cost however. Xi’an ships favor maneuverability over heavy armament or defensive protection.

Instead of picking up an alien ship that simply looks different, it will feel different!

Here’s the description:

• Xi’an Scout Unlocked! The Khartu is the light attack craft of the Xi’An military. Contrary to Human ship design, the Khartu doesn’t have a traditional main thruster, instead featuring an array of maneuvering thrusters on articulated rigs. This design allows for incredible agility, making them the bane of UEE pilots, who bestowed the nickname ‘Quark’ because when all of the thrusters are firing, the ship looks like a spark flying through space. The Xi’an Aopoa corporation also manufactures an export model, the Khartu-al, for sale to human civilians as a dedicated scout/explorer. The export model features the same Xi’an maneuvering rig, but control surfaces modified for human use and a more limited armament. (Designer: Aopoa)

Players can travel to a Xi’an commerce world to pick up the export version of the Khartu… or they can track down the military version in less-than-legal ways! Either way, we think that adding truly alien Xi’an ships at launch will create an even more immersive universe.

As always, thank you all for your tremendous support. Please continue to spread the word about Star Citizen. You’re making this all possible! I hope you will join me on Thursday for our anniversary livestream, where you’ll see some of the latest and greatest work we’ve done to date and get a sneak preview of what’s coming soon.

- Chris Roberts