Happy to have talked you around! It's by no means perfect, but there's potential there and I think they're making decent realistic decisions right now. I truly hope they can deliver what they're setting out to achieve, the groundwork is certainly coming into place now - hopefully, the pace will start to pick up over the next year or so now the base tech is kinda there. Unless I've missed something, it's basically just a head start when the game gets released. There's no special benefit beyond a head start and some base insurance for said ships.
I don't think it's going to be unfair on anyone who buys the game on release. It's potentially going to be a somewhat small number of people who have that initial advantage, and that won't counter skill. For multi-crew ships - it's still going to be key to have a full crew to make that count. Whilst the economy may be balanced significantly, I think it's unlikely it will shift to the point where you won't be able to make a competent PVP ship fairly quickly after release. But I guess we'll see. At the end of the day, the game will exist as it is thanks to those people who were happy to throw thousands of pounds at CiG for make-believe spaceships!
