Dear Dave Haddock, I just watched a critique of Star Citizen lore by the Templin Institute and I have to agree with most of what he says. As a writer, I have found myself wondering about many of the inconsistencies he brings up. The lack of history (which is understandable, as someone has to write it), the lack of structure to how the Government is set up. The complete inconsistencies of a working nation. The Narrator is correct when he says that it looks like it was set up by someone who knows nothing about how Government works. Of course it does, it was invented by a game developer. This is the same exact argument I've made about the weapons. They are designed by people who have never held a gun, let alone fired one, so they make no sense at all (I'm looking right at you, Coda). He's correct, the UEE would never work. Not as it has been described so far. The three branches of Government are loosely (very loosely) based on the American Republic, but instead of a Judicial Branch which determines if the laws are fair and fairly applied, the UEE has a police force that seems to be judge, jury and executioner (or at least jailer). The technology is barely a couple of hundred years in the future, but there is no real explanation as to why. Was there a Dark Age we don't know about? Perhaps some disaster that stagnated technological development for a few hundred years? A plague that wiped out a large percentage of the population and took time to overcome? Perhaps we fought a war against a rogue A.I. and the leadership passed rules against all technology, so it took a couple hundred years to allow the memory to fade before humanity was allowed to progress technologically. We are fast approaching the tenth anniversary of Star Citizen. Many, if not most of these oversites could have been dealt with, but they weren't. As a Backer since before Alpha 2.0 and a Concierge member (I point these out so that you understand I love this game and this is not an attack), I'm going to guess that the Lore Team has been too busy on creating current Lore, to go back and fix the really gaping holes in the historic Lore. The attached video is a very detailed critique of the Lore and I think a fair one. None of these problems are unfixable, but someone has to want to fix them. It's all well and good to write the Rule of Cool for current events, but who is tasked with creating the history and verifying that it has real continuity? If you want a living, breathing 'Verse, it must have a rich, detailed and compelling history. Some will reply that "It's just a game". If you really believed that, you wouldn't be backing it. Star Citizen is the game I always thought I would have to make, and I know many others feel the same way. I'm simply stating that some of the early, less thought out ideas need to be better fleshed out, preferably by someone who knows something about the topics, or is willing to do the research. Hell, the Vanduul, what we've been told about them as a culture, make absolutely no sense at all. If they are tribal or clannish in nature, they are going to have Gods, or some Higher Being that they honor, yet we have been told they do not. Every tribal or clannish culture we've ever encountered does, but the Vanduul do not. We (the Backers and Citizens of the Empire) have very little information on what makes the Vanduul tick. When we do find out about the Vanduul culture, it needs to make sense, otherwise it's just another badly written attempt at SciFi. There needs to be actual reasons behind what they do, not just because they are "irredeemable". There are far too many games that fit the description of "Bad SciFi". Star Citizen deserves better.