I spent many hours on the Tech Preview, first as an EVO tester, then in Wave 1. I tried as many things as possible: solo-crew PvE dogfighting, PvP, multi-crew, and so on. Obviously, the gameplay is complex and takes time to get the hang of, but I feel compelled to share my thoughts regarding engineering in general and its game design. Before I begin, I want to clarify two things: I love the theoretical concept of engineering: playing multi-crew on capital ships, repairing, etc. Nothing in my feedback is meant to question that. I'm not going to talk about bugs in this Tech Preview, because there are already enough Issue Councils, and honestly, bugs in a TP aren’t something that bother me. It’s fairly normal. January 2025. That was the date when engineering was supposed to release. It had been teased for a long time, several years or at least several months, and the last videos we had on the topic were from this ISC: We can see gameplay that appears to be exactly the same version we got this weekend. If I had received this version a year ago, I wouldn’t have complained. But one year later… all that waiting for no progress? Now... There are huge issues in the version we tested this weekend. The balancing is disastrous. Armor is missing. The interface is a mess. It feels like a collection of features each developed by a different person, with no overarching vision. To go into more detail: Repairs are incredibly slow, even with a large Cambio. It’s ridiculous; no one wants to spend 15 minutes holding left-click on an item to fix it with a magic beam. Even with multiple people on a single component, it's extremely slow. Meanwhile, a single fighter’s burst can blow up that same component in 10 seconds. They’re made of paper, even on large ships. By the way, TTK in dogfights is a joke. For years we’ve been telling you it’s too short, and what do you do? You shorten it even more. What’s your internal goal for TTK? How many seconds in a 1v1? You need to make up your minds someday, and ideally remember that 1v1 isn’t the end-all-be-all. Full ship explosions happen WAY too fast. There’s no chance to repair anything in combat. The enemy will always be better off finishing us off rather than switching targets when we’re disabled. The infinite drift when disabled makes manual repairs impossible if the ship can’t be restarted. Your ballistic/laser logic makes no sense. Lasers should deal ZERO damage to components, and ballistics shouldn’t work as long as shields are up. Right now it feels like you don’t know what to do with your weapon types. I won’t even talk about distortion weapons or exotic ones; I’m pretty sure you forgot they exist. The engineering interface… it’s messy. The MFD screen is not too bad for listing ship components. The engineer doesn’t get that list on their own interface… which means it’s impossible on a large ship to know which thruster is damaged, since it’s not shown on the engineering screen. It’s obvious we need an FPS scanning system to locate damaged parts on ships. The fuse system… does anyone even understand what it’s supposed to do right now? And you again forgot to make Cambio ammo available in shops, even though it becomes a crucial item with engineering. What drives me insane is that I noticed all these problems within less than an hour of play, and then confirmed everything by testing deeply for 7–8 hours with my mates. Why does CIG need us to point out this kind of feedback? Are you really unable to identify these problems yourselves? Wakapedia asking for TTK feedback in these conditions? You seriously think the gameplay is polished enough to ask for that kind of feedback? This really scares me for what’s coming next. If you had told us the build was old and messy, and that this was just a technical test for the tech behind it, I wouldn’t have had much to say. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. You spent the year working on new ships without bringing the old ones up to gold standard. We’re at the end of 2025 and a huge number are still missing. That’s bad. You spent the year in radio silence regarding engineering because you forced developers to work on fast-food content to push out monthly patches and boost player stats, instead of thinking long-term and assigning those same developers to one of the game’s flagship features. All in the name of money. And we’ve learned how you operate; we understand your priorities… but this is a bit too blatant. Get back on track quickly. Nobody cares about Race for Pyro or Save Stanton. Dropping 5 new ships, 4 of them terribly balanced, is also something nobody cares about. But a smooth, well-designed, balanced and polished engineering gameplay loop? No one is indifferent to that. A huge number of players are counting on it to come back to the game, to buy certain ships, and to enjoy Star Citizen. Stop messing around with short-term thinking, stop using SQ42 as an excuse to do anything on Star Citizen, and focus. Thanks for reading.