I was going to make this a general grab bag post, but I got hit in the face with a virtual wall of text describing the Engineering section coming in 4.5 Soon(tm) and I wanted to bitch about it. And I’ve got a few more things as well.

Intergalactic Aerospace Expo 2025

The IAE is one of two of Star Citizen’s largest dog and pony shows in the year. IRL it’s when all of the ships that CIG offers become available for sale (not all are available year round). There’s usually a “free fly event” for people who haven’t bought into the project to kick the tires, and everyone can rent and fly any ship featured during the show, for free. This year we got a few straight-to-flyable ships, such as the Drake Clipper (all purpose), the Drake Golem OX (small cargo), the Kruger L-22 Alpha Wolf (small fighter), the Greycat MDC (mobile point defense), the RSI Salvation (small salvage), and the RSI Perseus (large gunboat).

This was an important IAE in many ways. It took place during CIG’s “year of the patch” which is important in and of itself, but coupled with an annual free-fly event, IAE showed how resilient — or not — the game has become as a result of adding more people to the game servers than are usually present. On top of that CIG had just released a whole new star system, Nyx, and it’s home port of Levski.

While I think the past two weeks went generally well, I know that Levski was kind of a mess, with low frame-rates and frustrating bugs. Nyx in general was also suffering from performance issues even in the final hours of the show, as @CakedCrusader, @Mindstrike, and I were trying to get missions completed in the system, but were stymied by intense delays in progression and interactions.

I used store credit to secure the Salvation (a winner), the Golem OX (a loser), and pre-acquired the Drake Ironclad (a massive cargo-slash-vehicle hauler) and a MISC Hull B (cargo transport). Whether I keep them or not is still up in the air, but I did melt my Carrack and it’s children (the Ursa ground vehicle and Pisces shuttlecraft) so I’m kind of mobile-HQ-less. I am hoping the Ironclad might be good for such a task, but we’ll see.

Lots of Ship Talk

Here’s a 2 hour video talking about various ship things. I watched it when it was current so I don’t remember the specifics, but they went over a lot of changes to many ships, specifically cargo-related ships, some upcoming ships for 2026 which weren’t elaborated on, and some features such as the long-requested low-light amplification view for ships so we can see where the hell we’re landing when it’s dark out.

Although it wasn’t officially authoritative in regards to the “year of the patch”, it was mentioned that CIG released 27 ships this year without a single “concept” ship. A concept ship is what people referred to as “buying JPGs”, as they were ships that had been presented for sale as images. This is going to be CIG’s M.O. going forward, we’ve been promised, which is good because they have a pretty sizable backlog of ships that are still in concept phase that they are starting to get to as Squadron 42 is supposedly winding down and freeing up resources, I assume.

It was mentioned that CIG will release as many if not more ships next year to flyable status. A lot of ships haven’t been worked on because their gameplay purpose has not made it into the game (exploration or crafting, for example), so as those systems officially make it into the roadmap — ideally next year for crafting — we should see entire classifications of ships making their way to the pledge store.

That Big Number

CIG has raised over $900 million in funding to date. 2025 has been their best year ever.

Of course, this has been tracked over 13 years, and I’m not sure if it counts investor funding as well.

Patch 4.5

I won’t repost the eye-full I got last night from the Pipeline Discord posts, but here’s some of the upcoming highlights (some of them may or may not make it into the patch).

Loot rebalance

Several locations are getting their loot updated. This will move some items previously only available through the Wikelo trade system into the general “findable” pool, and will shuffle items around in sandbox modes. We’ve recently started looking for the Palladino armor sets which are randomly scattered in crates in these kinds of areas, so it sounds like we’ll need to step up our game before they shuffle off somewhere else.

Ship flight changes for VSC (very small craft)

This includes speed and handling updates for snub fighters and interceptors which might make people happy or piss them off. There is no in-between.

Ship armor

This is massive. As of this post, ships do not have armor; they have shields and hulls. Shields are directional, and hulls are one big single-unit targets that, once depleted, result in an exploded ship. Armor adds a layer between shields and the potential for explosions, and sounds like it’ll be section-specific, so no more “shoot anywhere” to disable or destroy a ship.

Engineering (here we go)

To understand engineering and the importance of armor, understand that right now, players can shoot ships to punch through shields, and then attack a ship directly. Once the ship’s HP has diminished, the ship can experience “soft death”: the ship is completely disabled, but not destroyed. Continuing to beat on a disabled ship will cause it to explode.

With engineering, ships will be made up of different parts. Starting outward and working our way in:

• Shields, which regenerate so long as they have power
• Armor, which can be repaired using a repair tool or at a hangar.
• Power flows through fuses and is stored in capacitors.
• Components provide electrical services for the ship, such as power generation, shields, engines, life-support, and so on.

Damage

In combat, when a ship takes fire, the attacker must penetrate shields using either traditional weapons or distortion weapons which affect the ship’s power system. Next, armor takes damage. Weapons will gain a “penetration value” which increases in a linear fashion as armor is worn away. Oddly, ballistic weapons are said to be less effective than energy weapons at penetrating armor. Once an attacker has reduced an armor segment to 0%, penetration occurs at it’s maximum value.

Once penetration of the hull starts, then internal components are at risk. Projectiles can punch through the hull and — if aimed correctly — hit internal components. Components also have HP, and when a component loses all of it’s points, it’s destroyed. Depending on the component, this can lead to a ship explosion. Other components will simply shut down, taking their dependencies (shields, thermal management, radar, propulsion, and life support) with them.

Repair

Players armed with a repair tool can scurry about the ship and repair damaged components using cannisters of RMC (repair material composite). I suspect this is going to be a very stressful job as a player will A) need to know where to go as quickly as possible, B) have a repair tool ready and loaded, and C) need to have extra RMC cannisters and know how to reload them when empty. Obviously the more engineers a ship has, the better of everyone will be.

Engineers will also need to replace blown fuses. When all fuses in a panel are destroyed through whatever means, power will no longer route through that circuit. If there’s an alternate route, an engineer can use a panel to do so, but otherwise any components downstream of that fuse box will cease to function.

On a good day

Engineering isn’t all about combat. Engineers can use an engineering panel to examine the power flow through a ship, and can create power distribution plans which can be stored as presets. Engineers are also responsible for keeping an eye on the overall health of a system, whether it’s because of combat or through general daily wear, and to handle it however is appropriate. There might be ways to optimize power flow through a ship to give a boost to components such as coolers which are critical to keeping other systems performant.

Engineers will need to be armed with repair tools and extra cannisters of RMC. They will also need to be carrying extra fuses, or know where they can get them quickly. If a component is destroyed and another is on hand (in storage, I would assume), then the engineer must replace it.

Fire and life support

As if that wasn’t enough to worry about, we’re getting fire on board our ships. Damage to components through combat or wear, or pushing a component past it’s recommended limits that increase heat generation, can increase the chance of a fire breaking out. CIG has spent a lot of time getting fire to behave “like fire”, including how it spreads, so that’s the bad news.

The good news is that ships will be getting usable extinguishers that will appear (or be activated in cases where they are already present) around the interior which can be used to fight the flames. Naturally these will have capacities, and can be used up (replacing them in their cradles will recharge them).

Another way to fight fires is by venting oxygen. An engineer can manage life support in a specific room where a fire is contained, or the engineer or pilot can simply…open the external doors. This makes it critical that players always wear a helmet.

Who want’s to be an engineer?

[Pundit hat on]. I’m already hating this system for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is because it now makes even the smallest “multi-crew ship” pretty close to being un-soloable, or rides the razor’s edge thereof. We’ve been flying around in a Paladin, with @CakedCrusader flying and myself in the swappable turret, and we’ve been doing pretty well taking on missions. However, we’re not untouchable, and we’ve lost shields a few times during particularly harry interactions. Right now we just outlast our enemies, but with the addition of engineering, one lucky hit from an NPC as small as an M50 or even a Pisces, following up from a heavier barrage from a larger NPC, could take out a component, and neither of us would be a good position to rectify the situation. A third crew member would be beneficial and would probably be all we’d need for this specific ship, but now the engineer role becomes the lynchpin as to whether or not a ship survives a combat encounter.

The good news is that the addition of armor should increase a ship’s TTK. Shields might need a buff, IMO, to make getting to the armor more difficult, but even at the armor penetration stage, simply hitting armor won’t kill a ship; it’ll require the tactical targeting of component areas to really do “damage” in order to take a ship out of the fight, or the material plane itself. In larger ships, pilots will need to really up their targeting game, or use the previously useless “target sub-system” option to focus on the component area they want to hit. Simply firing wildly won’t cut it as pilots will mainly be hitting “empty space”.

I didn’t talk about smaller craft, though. One-seater pilots won’t be able to get up and walk around their ship to repair, so they’ll be able to engineer their ships through the multifunction display (MFD) in a kind of “R2-D2” scenario. Of course, smaller ships also concentrate the location of their components around their chassis which makes them easier to hit with untargeted fire. I suppose in a way this tracks: smaller craft should be more fragile. They’ll get armor, of course, but no one-seat craft should be able to out-tank a larger, internally empty, multi-crew ship. What worries me about single-seater ships is that by making engineering work entirely through the MFD, players are also going to be at the mercy of Star Citizen’s crappy MFD UI design which requires us to not just move focus, but to execute a series of keystrokes in order to interact with the panels at a time when reaction times matter the most both to fix damage and to avoid additional damage.

I know Star Citizen is the latest descendant in a long line of “forced grouping” games, and people have leveled the accusation that “MMOs aren’t meant to be played alone”, but in reading the room for the past…what? 20 years? Understanding that people enjoy playing alone, or often times are forced to play alone, or feel more comfortable playing alone, or even that not everyone wants to be part of someone else’s group, or doesn’t even know enough people (nor do they want to) to tackle the game according to the designer’s demands, is something I thought developers and designers would accept in some way by now. Forcing players to play in ways counter to the prevailing sentiment might satisfy megalomaniacs like Chris Roberts and people who jeer from positions of having access to Lots of People, but it really makes a massive chunk of the game inaccessible to many, many others. I’m sure there are people who might read this, or just hear about what’s involved in the engineering system, and nope right the hell out for many reasons. It sounds stressful. It requires too many people to even approach success. It’s simply overwrought and doesn’t need to be this complicated. It detracts from the otherwise enjoyable parts of the game.

Some people will love the idea, though. In some dimension, I love the idea. Having to maintain a ship even during the off-hours isn’t a bad idea, and as far as all games feature sinks for money and time this is a pretty good one. Larger orgs will certainly be all over this, although it’ll suck for those people who get relegated to engineer and who didn’t want the role. There will also be those who simply like the challenge that engineering provides, and will willfully sign on to be a random crew member who in all actuality will probably end up saving the day.

My hope is that the introduction of armor and the actual participation of components and energy pathways will have the net result of increasing time to kill in combat. I’d be absolutely OK with fights taking longer, especially when I’m the one getting beat on. NAV mode is still a means of trying to fly away, although it’s never a guarantee. Sticking around to fight might be the best option assuming it’s a relatively fair fight (and it rarely is in any PvP scenario) if the survivability increases. Paying to replace components or repair at a hangar might be a worthwhile option when performed with the satisfaction that I survived some encounter. It’s really a case of “wait and see”, but the whole game is going to change with the introduction of engineering, for good or otherwise.