Not too keen on the starfighter design for either faction either, hope they have some sleaker sexier designs in the works too.

$6,105,786

Here's a small video showing off some AI dogfighting, looks absolutely gorgeous:
Star Citizen - Early work in progress - AI Combat

As it stands now the project raised $3,351,025 and there's 7 more days to go. I hope we'll crack the $4 mio. stretch goal especially  because of the promised mod tools. A Star Wars mod seems inevitable :-)

Anyway, save your awesome First Strike models and textures, they might be needed in 2 years.

And yes, those lasers hardly seem to move any faster than the fighters themselves.

I'd love a Babylon 5 space sim for just precisely those reasons you mention, in the show I think the Earthforce Starfury is probably the most true to life representation of how a true space fighter would have to operate and move, with the way it twisted and turned through space with the use of directional thrusters and hardly any thought given to aerodynamics as it was a purely space bound fighter and not designed to operate in an atmosphere.

I'm not a big fan of space carriers with ships on an open to space flight deck, but that was always part of the Wing Commander aesthetic too, so I suppose I should expect it, but I always found that touch a little too literal with its referencing of naval aircraft carriers, and a design touch that just wouldn't make sense in space. Other than that minor gripe I'm loving the look of this.

Yeah that looked weird to me too. There are some more inconsistencies. For example those fans at the head of the fighters don't make any sense in space as well. It's not like you could suck fluid inside the machine to cool it off or generate propulsion.

Although he said it will have newtonian physics I doubt that the game will mimic actual space. You'd have absolutely no air drag which means you could fly with unlimited speed. I don't know any game that actually implemented space as it is in real life. It's probably just not fun enough.

Looks good, will have to give those vids a quick look when I get the chance.

[EDIT:] Just watched the first one, nice!

I'm not a big fan of space carriers with ships on an open to space flight deck, but that was always part of the Wing Commander aesthetic too, so I suppose I should expect it, but I always found that touch a little too literal with its referencing of naval aircraft carriers, and a design touch that just wouldn't make sense in space. Other than that minor gripe I'm loving the look of this.

Here's a 5 minute video showing the game in action. Mind you, that's ingame graphics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlIWJlz6-Eg&hd=1

And here's a 10 minute long video where he goes more into detail what he has planned for his game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhsgiliheP0&hd=1

Star Wars mod incoming? Hell yes ;-)

He's also trying to stay away from big publishers. For that he needs pledges from the community. If you've got something to spare for this awesomeness you can do so on
www.robertsspaceindustries.com
(under heavy load at the moment)