The Next Great Starship, the modding competition that gives fans a chance to create a space ship to be used in Chris Roberts’ upcoming epic space sim game, Star Citizen™, is just about to get real for 24 teams. The series kicks off on YouTube, January 31, and a handful of teams will be eliminated by judges at the end the first episode. Sponsors for the competition include Alienware, AMD, Autodesk, Crytek, Cologne Game Lab, Maingear, Wacom and YouTube.

The Next Great Starship airs Fridays at 6 pm Eastern/3 pm Pacific. Fans are encouraged to join the Roberts Space Industries YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd to watch. Star Citizen is the creation of Roberts’ Cloud Imperium™ Games studio, headquartered in Los Angeles.

A total of 270 teams representing 65 countries entered the competition. The judging panel includes members from Star Citizen’s art, design and animation teams, in addition to Chris Roberts himself. Celebrity judges will appear in later episodes. The judges already have narrowed the initial list of entries to the top 24 teams. Over the next three weeks that number will shrink even more with judges picking 15 finalists and the community having an opportunity to vote for one team that will make it into the final 16. Every week after that, each team will provide work-in-progress videos to the panel and face the possibility of elimination (judges can save teams and the community also has a vote on who stays and who leaves). It all culminates in The Next Great Starship finale airing on June 7 from Los Angeles where the champion team will be crowned and awarded $30,000 in cash in addition to many other great prizes.

Wingman’s Hangar will not be seen this week. It will return next week at a new time, Wednesday noon EST!