Greetings Star Commanders! We have wrapped up our UI transition as well as the adding in the ability to build stores on your station. This is huge for us - it has been in progress for quite a long time and the game is in a solid, playable state. We have also added in physic effects for exposions, vacuums and other entities. What does that mean? Your guys will get knocked around and sucked into space when huge explosions occur. It's really fun and adds a ton to the game. Our goal for this week is to get the tutorial portion of the game in (called Phase 0) and move into polishing our Phase 1 missions (intiial encounters dealing with pirates and other low level enemies). After those are in a solid state we will probably move towards pushing a new build. Our goal is to get to the content phase as fast as humanly possible. We don't consider the tutorial or anything we are working to really be that - it requires too much custom content and special conditions to be considered template style missions that we can use across the game. But our ability to quickly generate content is very encouraging - it's something we have been chasing for over 3 years and we feel like the game is at the point were we can just make awesome things like new weapons, new ships, new missions, new kits, and lots of world building stuff rather than working on bugs, crashes, lighting, physics and UI. We are hard at work and are really trying to get Alpha 9 into your hands by the end of the month. Cheers! Warballoon