Star Citizen. Breathtaking New Trailer. Admiral Hackett .?

I dont have the game yet, but there are some ships that need/recommend multi person crews, this freelancer being one of them (2-3 crew i think) and if you dont have friends that can man the guns or do whats needed, the AI can tend to them, so yeah it can be automated. Actual automated turrets even outside of an NPC using them? I'm not sure myself but i wouldnt be surprised if larger ships had them. And yeah the general consensus so far is that the mouse and keyboard controls for SC are the king at the moment

so there is mouse control in Star Citizen? And automated turrets with AI crew would make me really want the game. If all that were true I would buy this day one.

No. All of the combat is done manually in Star Citizen. You *could* acquire a bigger ship and hire NPC gunners, but the combat will be fought in real time and no NPC could replace an even average human.

There is going to be mouse aiming but it's not going to be as generous as Star Conflict or Warthunder. The game will probably be best played with a joystick in the end. We are about to endure many months of balancing to ensure no one control scheme is unplayable though.

If the controls are too accurate then the whole combat is ruined. The entire game is about manuvers, speed, and hard hitting weapons. It's not about beating your opponent up with a lot of ammo before they die or about acquiring the better ship. It's a very low TTK game. Extremely precise control would ruin the combat. Furthemore the game may not be realistic but the physics system applied to the ship and characters in the ship is. G-forces are a huge part of combat. If you're going 150 m/s and bank into a turn without any sort of computer guidance you will black out your character from the excessive g-forces you will pull. This is to prevent every dogfight in the game from becoming a big circle-strafe dance like we see in a lot of other space games. The low-TTK is meant to deter people from combat as combat is extremely risky in Star Citizen and should be intense when it does happen.

It really sounds like this game isn't for you. The flight model is based off of WWII aircraft rather than gravity defying spaceships. It's amazingly fun. The idea behind dogfighting is maneuvering and speed, not weak weapons and ships with good stats. It's very little RPG and much more simulation.

Yeah you can use mouse in star citizen, I haven't really tried it, but people have mixed feeling about mouse control currently. All the control methods are still being tweaked of course, the game isn't even a week in alpha. You definitely can get AI crew for ships to take over things like turrets, and you can get different ranked Npc's that are better at it if you pay them more. There are confirmed automated defense systems on some larger ships, for smaller turrets they haven't confirmed either way on whether you can get them automated.

@Wasdie: Mouse controls don't need to be that accurate though. In Star Conflict the physics work well enough, the big ships turn very slow and strategy is key the way a real space fight would be (the weapons suck though and really drag the game down especially at T3). So the best way to let people fly is by allowing the mouse to point in a direction and the ship flies there as fast as it can, the big ships just let the mouse direct a destination of travel and it turns at the rate possible. And allow targeting systems with numbered targets and an easy target acquisition system (an auto lock closest and cycle/multiple targeting system). It's the obvious best way to allow fighting in space and allows for both dogfighting between the smaller more agile ships where it's possible to weave between the smaller objects while the larger ships have to decide what they hide behind. Honestly the targeting is way more important to me though.

If you have Alpha access with your pledge, which is likely if you have an early package, you get a loaner ship depending on what you already have

My machine is a beast and probably not representative but it's runs smooth as butter at 1080p 60 fps on very high, some occasional dips in the hangar but nothing lower than 44 fps.

i7 4770k, 16Gb Ram, GTX 780ti

Sweet!, then my system should hopefully run it smooth too. Mine is i7 4790 + 32Gb + Titan Black.

The pledge I made was Digital Freelancer ($125) back when it was announced.

I guess it is comparable when your PC is even more of a beast :)

With a Freelancer pledge you should get a Hornet Trainer as a loaner until the Freelancer get's into the alpha.

They wont . after year one consoles never surpass PC gfx.

7 more years of fighting for 2nd place.

Sweet! thanks for the info. The download started to work again for me (albeit very slow). Can't wait to give it a try :)