The Roberts Space Industries website offers the video of the CitizenCon 2013 live show, a broadcast celebrating yesterday's first anniversary of the announcement of Star Citizen, RSI's crowd-funded space game. One of the revelations along the way is their "Next Great Starship" design competition that will kick off at the end of this month. This will offer a grand prize of US$30,000 and high-end workstations for the team that creates a starship model to be included in the game based on voting from the community and their judging panel. Entries begin on October 31st and a YouTube reality series will begin in January and culminate with a winner in June, though this probably won't feature the chills and thrills of watching competition computer modeling they imply when they say the two finalists "will compete live in front of the judging panel and the community during the final episode that takes place June 8 in Los Angeles." Here's word:

Teams can register for The Next Great Starship October 31 through December 31. A preliminary challenge involves the making of a fully designed wave particle cannon, submitted via a YouTube video to a nine member judging panel including Chris Roberts and other members of the CIG design and art team, Crytek and even some to-be-named celebrity judges. Those initial entries will be narrowed down to a final 16 and one of the 16 will be voted on by Star Citizen backers. Then those 16 teams will embark on making their Starship entries. Beginning January 31, 2014, episodes of The Next Great Starship will air once a week on the Roberts Space Industries™ (RSI) YouTube channel with each team providing a work in progress update to the judging panel. Judges will eliminate teams down to a final two which will compete live in front of the judging panel and the community during the final episode that takes place June 8 in Los Angeles.