Greetings Citizens,

Late last year, we asked the community to vote on the next ‘wave’ of ships we design for Star Citizen. A new ship was selected as each stretch goal, for a total of six winners. The ships in questions ranged from a mobile salvage yard to a luxury yacht to a speedy data runner. You can find the original concept bios for all six ships below.

The great news is that these ships are getting to a stage in their development where we’re ready to share their concepts! Ship design is incredibly important in Star Citizen, and Chris Roberts does not approve ship art for release until it is up to his personal standards. So we’re getting close to the final forms of the base ships… and are ready to start offering them in concept sales!

In the past, concept sales have been short ‘blink and you miss it’ events to reveal new ships. Going forward, we’ve decided to change the process to offer some extras for backing a Star Citizen ship at this earlier stage in its development; some more exclusive rewards to make up for the fact that you can’t go right out and play with a concept ship the day it’s for sale.

When a ship’s concept gets ‘final approval’ from Chris, we plan to offer it as a one-week concept-only sale. After that week ends, the ship will not be available for sale until it is ready for use in the Hangar. In addition, we are going to offer several extras available only during the concept period:

The Lowest Price – backing earlier helps the production process the most, so it stands to reason that early backers should get the lowest price for their ships. Future Hangar-ready and flight-ready sales will increase the cost of a ship hull slightly.

Hangar Flare – everyone who backs a concept sale will receive two pieces of Hangar Flare. At launch, you’ll get a poster featuring the ship you’ve purchased to display in your Hangar and when the CryEngine model asset is finished you’ll get the in-game Takuetsu model to add to your collection!

Lifetime Insurance – one of the most common demands of CS is that we offer newly announced ships with cross-chassis upgrades to preserve LTI . While we maintain that Lifetime Insurance is a slight convenience and not a game changer, we know it’s something a lot of backers want. We feel comfortable including it during concept sales of ships which have never been available before (and do not intend to make it available again for existing ships or variants.) We will however, be adding LTI retroactively to the Gladius and Xi’An Scout if they were purchased during their respective concept sales.

We’re aware that this is a change to how sales have worked in the past, so we wanted to announce the plan early to let the community know our intentions. Sales like this are what keeps Star Citizen funded; the revenue we take from selling ships at different stages in the pipeline gets turned right back into the game, expanding our scope to match Chris’ ultimate vision for the Best Damn Space Sim Ever!

The first concept sale for this wave of ships will be Friday, September 26th. We can’t reveal which ship it is yet… so sound off in the poll below and let us know which one you want to see! (The poll will not impact next week’s presentation, but it will let us know which ships you’re most eager to see!)