Star Citizen Opens Final IAE 2950 Hall With All Ships Flyable for Free; Crowdfunding Passes $332 Million

Today Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games opened the final “Best in Show” exhibition hall of the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo 2950.

The hall features the fur finalists of the Ship Showdown popular vote hosted a few weeks ago, the Carrack (which won the overall vote), the Eclipse, the Cutlass, and the Valkyrie.

To celebrate, those are being offered for purchase with a limited edition white livery.

Perhaps a lot more interesting is the fact that the lower floor of the hall hosts a rental center that will let you rent all the flyable ships for free for two days. In previous days of the expo, ships were available on a brand ration.

Now you can grab them all, so it’s basically the best time to try Star Citizen if you’re on the fence and you want to see with your own eyes what this much-discussed game is all about instead of listening to my personal opinions or to other people on the internet who may or may not have played it.

The hall will close on December 2, so you should be able to rent the ships for two days twice, and to have fun with a good chunk of the flyable lineup before the rental expires. It’s worth mentioning that the Free Fly Event is still going on, so all you need is to make a free account and download the client. Pledging money to the game is not required to play until December 2.

Another nice perk of the new hall is the armor and weapon exhibition. Tons of weapons and armor are displayed and purchasable (with in-game credits) in front of the rental desk, which is good if you don’t want to search for them in specific shops all over the Stantom System.

You can see a few screenshots below.

In other Star Citizen news, the crowdfunding train during the expo is steaming, with the total currently at 332,240,688, having passed $332 million today. This means that the game made well over $2 million in a day, and this should be the biggest daily jump of the expo.

The number of registered accounts has also passed 2.9 million today and it’s currently at 2,902,595.

As usual, you should keep in mind that it’s known that not all of them are paying players. The number includes free accounts created for a variety of reasons, including Free Fly events like the one going on right now.

If you want to learn more, we recently got a sizable update on the progress of the single-player campaign Squadron 42 and a really lovely cinematic trailer. On top of that, we recently heard that a new studio has been opened to create new systems and content for Star Citizen.

For the sake of full disclosure, the author of this article has been a Star Citizen backer since the original Kickstarter campaign several years ago, so you should keep that in mind while reading.