Star Citizen is a sandbox game, and one of the best aspects of sandbox games is that stuff happens that wasn’t predicted by the developers.
The current Invictus Launch Week event includes a show in which the UEE fleet brings in a fleet of military ships (among which you can see the massive Javelin destroyer). Accompanying the fleet is a flight of the brand new F-8 Lightning with a special livery belonging to the elite pilots of the 999th “The Wreckless” Test Squadron.
The F8 Lightning is a rather special fighter because you can’t normally purchase it. As military-only hardware, you’ll have to clear the upcoming Squadron 42 single-player campaign in order to unlock the ability to buy one in the online persistent universe.
As such, no one is supposed to be able to fly one right now, and the AI-controlled fighters we can see in the current alpha are there with a strictly “look but don’t touch” policy.
That being said, Stra Citizen players are known to be rather crafty, and found a way to get around said policy.
They came up with a fairly complex strategy that involves luring one of the AI fighters away with a wanted player, glitching it, opening the canopy from outside, and shooting the pilot, in order to steal the F-8.
Turns out that the fighters are actually functional, and while they can’t be refueled or repaired, you can fly them around for a much-prized joyride and even use them in combat.
Below you can see the results thanks to a video by YouTube user Morphologis providing a first look at what it is like to fly the Lightning.
Funnily, Associate creative producer Jared “Disco Lando” Huckaby caught him in the act, so the development team is now aware of the “issue” (personally, I’d call it an ” unintentional feature”).
Below the video you can also check out a few pictures of the standard livery of the fighter, which is currently on display at the Invictus Launch Week expo in the game.
In other Star Citizen news the crowdfunding total is almost at $287 million.
To be more precise, it’s sitting on $286,946,825 (meaning that it made over 2.5 million during the latest Free Fly event started on Friday) at the moment of this writing.
The number of registered accounts now over 2.6 million (currently 2,661,091, which is roughly 43,000 more than Friday).
As usual, 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.
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 this article.
