Roberts Space Industries announced that a new ship has joined the roster in Star Citizen… at least, conceptually anyway. The new A4A Hurricane is a small fighter craft with six guns and three missile launchers designed to turn anything unlucky enough to be caught in the cross hairs into a pre-salvage sandwich.

The new ship was unveiled over on the official RSI website, where they run through the typical marketing spiel to play up and promote the ship’s design and capabilities during a tough dogfight. The major issue, however, is despite the fact that the ship is available for pre-order for $160 you won’t be playing it anytime soon in the actual game. Why? Because it’s still in the conceptual design phase. According to the RSI website…

“The Hurricane is currently scheduled to become flight-ready later this year. Because it is a smaller spacecraft, which uses the existing Anvil design aesthetic and dogfighting mechanics already tested in the Star Citizen Alpha, we expect it to come online earlier in the pipeline.”

In addition to the announcement of being able to pre-purchase a ship that won’t be seeing the light of day until later in the year, DualShockers also reported that Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games have managed to rack up more than $144 million in crowdfunding.

Hilariously enough there are still some comments calling the whole thing one giant scam, despite the fact that there’s a playable race mode, a dogfighting mode called Arena Commander, an e-sports ready FPS mode called Star Marine, and the playable PTU available to those with alpha access.

Development may be kind of slow but a lot of that is due to the fact that it’s a darn big game. That’s not to mention that they’re making a game that’s actually ambitious, unlike 100% of the content being produced by AAA studios for home consoles. Hey, come on… you know it’s true. The only game that might be different is Red Dead Redemption 2, but I’m not holding my breath until I actually see some real-time gameplay footage to prove it’s not a dumbed down, stripped back, limited rendition of an open-world experience like what happened going from GTA IV to GTA V.

Anyway, the A4A Hurricane is available for pre-purchase along with some other ships that are also available for purchase over on the Star Citizen shop. They recently dropped alpha version 2.6.1, which recently dropped just a couple of weeks ago.

A lot of gamers are looking forward to the next big milestone alpha release, which should add some interesting elements to Star Citizen.