Greetings Citizens,

It goes without saying that we were blown away by the response to the Aurora sale. In just one week, we raised over $700,000 for Star Citizen’s development and gained thousands of new supporters! We hope you all enjoyed the extra material released last week… there’s more to come! Today we’d like to clarify a few more issues and provide some information requested after last week’s poll.

Lifetime Insurance

We’ve had many, many questions about how lifetime insurance works now that we have met the $9 million stretch goal. To clarify: every ship on your account today plus any ship purchased before the new site goes live will have Lifetime Insurance (LTI) attached to it. Anyone who starts a new account and pledges between now and the new site will have LTI on those ships. After the new site opens, LTI will be on a per-ship basis rather than per-account.

Early backers, defined as everyone who bought a package before November 26th 2012, will be able to continue buying ships with LTI at the new site. These ships can be gifted to others and the LTI will transfer for that individual ship. This will not allow the person receiving the LTI ship to buy additional LTI packages. Early backers will be able to continue purchasing additional LTI ships until November 26th, 2013. After the new site is live unless you are an early backer, all ships will be sold with the standard insurance package that comes with the individual ship in the finished game.

The new site will have a different method for handling upgrades and pledge customization. The current upgrade system is being replaced with a more robust system that allows you to ‘reclaim’ unused ships and items for credit. Rather than being limited to ‘upgrades’ only,  your money can go to any package,  including addons, rather than just the ‘next level.’ We mention this now because LTI will no longer carry over in the upgrade process; an LTI Aurora cannot be changed to an LTI Constellation after the new site launches. The new site will display the LTI status of each ship on your account, so there will be no confusion.

Beijing? Shanghai!

Several users pointed out last week that the concept art of Beijing looked more like Shanghai. We investigated the matter and discovered that the concept artist did, indeed, base the city on photographs of Shanghai. Good eye, citizens! Given the choice between throwing out the extremely cool artwork and starting again or changing the city in the finished game, we have decided to do the latter. As a result, the third landout city on Earth will be Shanghai rather than Beijing!

P52 Specifications

One of the responses to last week’s post asked for specifications for the P52, the “snub fighter” included with every Constellation. We developed these internally some time ago and are happy to share them with the community: P52 Merlin Builder: Kruger Intergalactic (under license) Crew (max): 1 Mass (empty): 5,500 KG Focus: Point Defense Upgrade Capacity: 1 Cargo Capacity: none Engine- Modifiers: 1 Max. Class: Chemical Thruster Class: 3xTR2, 8xTR1 Hardpoints- 3 x Class 1: 2 x VOLT Stinger Repeating Laser, 1 x Klaus & Werner Mk. 40F Gatling Laser Cannon 1 x Class 3: none equipped

What’s Next?

Last week, we polled you as to which ship you would like to see next and the winner by a nose was the ORIGIN 300i. As we teased on Friday, there will be a 300i brochure in the near future. The current plan is to finish it before the new site is released, complete with another promo to help us reach the $10 million stretch goal.