A new Letter from the Chairman on the Roberts Space Industries offers a whopping twenty-two hundred or so word essay on the state of Star Citizen, the upcoming space combat game. Chris Roberts notes they are celebrating the fourth anniversary of the project, which includes a sale to support their now-stated goal of not stopping at their original stated goals. On that front he says, "The additional ships are rewards for helping expand our dream, to make sure we continue to go above and beyond what we set out to create." The post also includes a link to the Production Schedule Report mentioned last night, broken into a number of complicated subsections, but they all seem to be end at the release of alpha version 2.6 on December 8th, and don't seem to offer any outlook on when to expect a full release. The news is also accompanied by a few new videos from the game (thanks DSOGaming), a Star Marine Preview, the Big Guns of the UEE, and Behind The Big Guns of the UEE. Here's a bit from the blog post on their reasoning for selling still more ships for the uncompleted game, and it's doubtful that anyone would argue his point that no other game offers their options for "refactoring" pledges, since they are way off in the uncharted regions of crowdfunding:

The desire to continue to improve Star Citizen is also why we have begun offering an incentive to purchase a new concept with fresh money rather than melting a ship and using store credit. We offer backers a more comprehensive system for melting and refactoring their pledges than we had ever dreamed possible back in 2012, which is a system I believe no other game offers, and as a result you can often swap to a more favored ship without impacting funding at all. We built this to allow you all to be able to purchase a ship with confidence, knowing that if something you like better comes along you can switch out to it with minimal hassle and no loss. We do not intend to change this system, but maintaining it means that we need to find other ways to encourage new contributions rather than just recycling old ones as the continued funding means we can continue to make the game as good as it possibly can be. Going forward, these cash sales will focus on newly introduced concept ships and top tier limited capital ships.