A new Letter from the Chairman on the Roberts Space Industries website announces Star Citizen has hit the $46 million milestone in crowd-sourced funding less than a week after passing the $45 million mark (thanks 88fingers and MammonLord). Chairman Roberts offers details on the "Updated Scanning Software" this adds to the space combat game, and reveals the winner of last week's poll for their next commercial. He caps things off with a new poll, which asks whether they should continue to offer stretch goals, as he explains in this excerpt:

This brings me to the topic of stretch goals. When we started the Star Citizen campaign, the purpose of the stretch goals was to make things we had imagined but didn’t think we could afford possible: adding capital ship systems, studying procedural generation, hiring additional artists to build more ships at once and the like. The additional funding continues to expand the scope of the game and make what we’re doing possible… but it’s becoming more and more difficult to quantify that with more stretch goals (and to explain that to the rest of the world, which likes to focus only on how much money we’ve made.)

My preference would be to use these letters going forward to update you on what we’re already doing with the money; sharing additional parts of Star Citizen’s development. We would also continue to award flare and other extras to our backers as we hit milestones, whether they’re funding or schedule-related. If we discover additional technologies or come up with new elements to the game’s design we want to incorporate, we’ll let you know about those as they happen. But this is a decision for the community: let me know what you think in the poll below.