Roberts Space Industries have shared alarming new details about its upcoming space sim Star Citizen. What would you say about the possibilities of a space mutiny?

No, they didn’t confirm a limping John Phillip Law, but they are saying it is possible for your crew to mutiny on you. That is, if you hire crew outside the United Empire of Earth, there is a chance they could do it, compared to UEE employees. The flip side is hiring outside the UEE allows you to set their pay. If they mutiny, they can kill crew members loyal to you and take over your ship.

Hacking will also be an element in the game, for ships like the Idris. Hackers that get into Idris’ electronics can make the ships airlocks blow out, or lower their shields. Your only countermeasure is to hire counterhackers. Hackers and counterhackers alike are human players, so you are basically guaranteed to play with someone else.

What else is in Star Citizen? Spying. Characters can get fake IDs to enter ships, and wrought whatever havoc they want. Frankly, I can only think of how these game elements can ruin the experience, especially for newcomers, but we’ll see how it plays out.

RSI also described the Idris Frigate in some detail. While it can be managed by one human player, NPCs will simply not have as much potential as other human players. If you will use NPCs, they earn experience that is lost forever when they die.

Flying ships like the Idris will be ‘difficult to take’, implying a complicated, realistic sim experience. It will also have a red alert system that is sure to keep all human players on board on the top of their toes. They’re releasing a variant ships sale at the end of this month. The Freelancer commercial is coming late May, along with their facial capture system. The Connie and Cutlass will be following the Freelancer not long after.

Cargo will be somewhat realistic. There will be individual, separate containers that can be physically arranged, and of course ,they will contain actual cargo. They’re still figuring out the specifics of weight capacities and all that, but they’re probably not using the ton as a measurement unit.

Gatling guns blow up when they overheat. I’m sure you’re going to want to try that now.

For those curious, the PC build they’re using at PAX East is a GTX690, with 32 GB RAM and 4770K i7 board. The video card was not optimized, but the CPU was being pushed to its limits.

Finally, no mods for now. Christ Roberts likes the modding community, but they’re not enabling mods yet, presumably so that RSI can reveal their full vision first.

Star Citizen is coming to Windows, MacOS, and Linux, currently scheduled for next year. Check out a spiffy new Star Citizen image gallery below.