@CakedCrusader and I managed to get a mostly-working server in Star Citizen recently, and I have to reiterate that despite all of the grief that the game throws at us, when it works, it’s pretty great. When we make it work even when the game doesn’t want us to, it’s spectacular.

Since CIG wiped everyone’s everything, we, like everyone else, are scrambling to re-build our nest eggs. Due to the mountain of jank introduced by the 4.8 patch, getting paid has been incredibly difficult, with missions not showing up, or waypoints not appearing correctly, or, as we’ll see shortly, the server physics not physic-ing.

In our last run we managed to get two bunker missions in a row that not only worked, but which we could actually complete. We ended up with some nice loot after the first run, stocking up CC’s Corsair inventory with armor, weapons, and ammo taken from the dead bodies of our NPC enemies. We had originally taken the Perseus but CC’s M.O. for these missions is to park the ship outside the range of the bunker turrets and drive in with the MTC, the “mobile turret car” or something like that. He drives, I shoot any NPCs outside of the bunker, and it works well, but the Perseus can’t carry a ground vehicle; hence the Corsair.

Well, the second mission wasn’t so great. We managed to complete it just fine, but ran into a familiar issue wherein one or maybe both of us are unable to collide with our vehicles. In this case, I was able to board to Corsair and get into the MTC, but CC wasn’t able to board the ship. He could get into the MTC just fine, but the MTC itself couldn’t get up the ramp into the Corsair. Normally we’d abandon the ground car assuming we could both get on the ship, but considering CC couldn’t get into the ship this time, we had to look for alternative solutions.

We decided that I would pilot his Corsair back to A18, where I’d switch to the Mercury, return, and hopefully collect CC and the MTC. While I was in the process of completing this step, CC took the MTC and drove it towards a ship signature that was about 20KM from our mission location to see what was waiting there.

Turns out it was a Polaris.

For those not following the game, 4.8 introduced a new mechanic supposedly intended to stop cheaters from duplicating ships. When a player looses a ship, either because it blew up or because the player got separated from the ship and can’t get back to it, the player can file an insurance claim. If the original ship is still in the game world (i.e. not destroyed), then the original ship becomes “bricked” a certain amount of time after a claim is filed by the owner. Bricking a ship prevents players from continuously claiming ships, but it also removes a lot of key game-play opportunities.

Luckily for CC, only part of the Polaris was bricked. The power-plant was fine for some reason, which meant that he was able to power up the ship and take it into orbit. The quantum drive was trash, however, so he couldn’t travel.

When I arrived with the MSR, we tried to drive the MTC from the Polaris into the back of the MSR, but once the nose of the car left the confines of the ship, it parted ways with gravity and started to float away. Had the MSR had a tractor beam, or maybe if I had a large, portable tractor — everything got wiped, remember? Including my ability to afford a new large tractor beam — I might have been able to drag the MTC into the back of the Mercury, but CC had already come to terms with losing the car so he EVA’d out and over to the MSR. We returned to A18 where he was able to reassert control over the Corsair, this time with no issue and no need to claim it.

This is one example of how a bug (?) in CIG’s implementation of an advanced insurance system failed in a good way. The Polaris should have been completely bricked, but for some reason only part of it was, and it was a part that wasn’t necessary for our purpose. Players lose ships all the time for reasons well outside of their control, such as server crashes or simply unexplainable technical issues. Whomever left that Polaris behind probably lost it due to one of these issues, or maybe their problem was like our problem and they also needed another ship to come in and rescue them when their Polaris couldn’t bring them home. Players had come to rely on being able to “sidejack” these abandoned ships to get away from mission locations when they suddenly found themselves stranded, and the bricking system prevents that. We lucked out, and although CC could have just stayed put on the ground in the MTC until I arrived with the MSR, this scenario played out with greater dramatic effect.