Today, Cloud Imperium Games revealed one of the biggest yearly events in Star Citizen, with a twist, DefenseCon 2956.
The twist is that usually, this event would be Invictus Launch Week, which celebrates the in-lore celebration of the beginning of the new recruitment year for the UEE Fleet.
DefenseCon has always been a counter-convention hosted by Drake Interplanetary, running side-by-side with Invictus because Drake wasn’t invited due to its seedy reputation as a favorite ship manufacturer for outlaws and pirates.
This year (2956 in the running Star Citizen calendar), the UEE pulled the celebration of Invictus Launch Week back to the capital system of Sol, so Drake swooped in and grabbed the spotlight in the Stanton System, hosting all the other manufacturers.
The trailer shows the Drake Ironclad, which appears to be a tease that the highly anticipated ship will become flyable.
The event will run between May 14 and May 27, and it’ll have the usual free-fly event, which will offer the ability to try Star Citizen at no cost, on top of most of its ships on a rolling schedule that you can find below.
We also get the tease of the Anvil Odin, an absolutely massive battlecruiser that will be available for purchase on May 24 during Anvil Aerospace Day of Defensecon.
It’s twice as large as the Javelin, and only members of the “Odin Founders Club” will be able to purchase one for now. These will be selected according to in-game metrics intended to identify the most active captains. Those who want to be part of it can also send a concierge ticket describing in 999 words or fewer why they want to become captains of a battlecruiser.
The declared idea is to include in the group players “dedicated to the principles of cooperative group play and positive impact on the ‘verse,” since the Odin is “built around crew, coordination, and the dedicated people behind them.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s a PC exclusive, crowdfunded project directed by Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame. It’s a multiplayer sandbox space simulator that has been in development for over a decade and in alpha for several years.
The crowdfunding total for the game is almost at $970 million, and it’s currently sitting at $967,609,756. The game currently has 6,476,323 registered accounts, but we know that not all are paying customers.
Some are alt accounts, while others are simply created to enjoy the “Free Fly” periods that fairly often let non-backers enjoy the game at no cost, like the one coming at Defensecon.
It’s notable that Star Citizen’s funding tally for 2025 has beaten all records from previous years by a large margin.
A single-player campaign titled Squadron 42 is also in active development with a 2026 release window, starring an exceptional cast of famous actors, including Mark Hamill, Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, Liam Cunningham, Gillian Anderson, and more.
Since the project has been in development for over a decade, you can see how Squadron 42 has evolved since its first reveal.
Full disclosure: the author of this article has backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign.
