Is physics according to the Father of the Universal Law of Gravity still planned? It was promised directly on the original Kickstarter page and Star Citizen is a Space Sim so one would expect that it simulates space! What are the main difficulties remaining? If we knew, we might come up with some ideas to help? From the Kickstarter page: You wanted proper Newtonian mechanics. You got it! Autopilot under IFCS could take care of orbits for all the QT manoeuvres that we do now, however full Newtonian physics and orbital mechanics would allow a navigator role to be meaningful. Ships with a good navigator could do advanced manoeuvres, e.g. a direct sling-shot when arriving at a planet, taking them directly to a moon, then the landing site without dropping out of QT at all. EDIT: I have gathered from comments that people are concerned that I want to make Star Citizen feel like Kerbal Space Program. That is not the point at all of this post! Orbital flight is the main gameplay in Kerbal, so ships have main thrusters with very limited fuel and very weak RCS thrusters for manoeuvring. The game forces you to eke out any advantage you can from clever orbital manoeuvres and makes for slow, very thoughtful and sometimes tedious gameplay. SC ships are immensely more powerful than ships in Kerbal! SC ships have mavs capable of many g's of thrust for hours on end; they have to, or else space combat wouldn't be possible. In SC, a ship can hover on it's mavs for as long as you like. That has deep implications for how orbits will feel; most importantly, if you can hover close to the ground, you can hover at orbital height as well, so an SC ship is not even forced to be in an orbit if you don't want to! You can just stop in your orbit and hover on your mavs at any time. Orbital speed on Earth is less than 8000 m/s (I don't know what it will be for the Stanton planets). In 5-8 times the time it takes to reach your ship's top speed you could go from a stand-still above Earth to full orbital velocity, or the opposite, stopping dead from full orbital speed. If that is too long for you, QT can take you there instantly. For ships in roughly matched orbits (e.g. approaching a space station or during a dogfight), there will be no difference at all to how SC feels now. For long distance rendezvous you will use QT anyway and let automatics take you there, unless you specifically want to do orbital flight manually. The main difference is that with orbits, space would be real and that makes it immersive. That is the point of this post. Oh, for a game with great atmospheric entry/exit, try "Flight of Nova". I would really like to see atmospheric entry/exit be something like that in SC!