* AllStarCast: ''Squadron 42'' features a stacked cast, including: Creator/GaryOldman, Creator/MarkHamill, Creator/BenMendelsohn, Creator/JohnRhysDavies, Creator/GillianAnderson, Creator/AndySerkis, Creator/MarkStrong, and Creator/LiamCunningham.
* AscendedFanon: A few examples arose even before the game hit alpha. The developers have a good relationship with the game's early/crowdfunding community, and early community in-jokes have already begun to make their way into the actual development process.
** Space Lube: The Geddon System, concept introduced during the crowdfunding campaign, introduces a commercial trade good - a high-quality space engine lubricant called "Planetsblood", produced and refined from one of the planets' active underground volcanoes. A possible tribute to the site's chat room regulars and the then-frequent devolution of live chat content to jokes, references, and innuendo about space lube and everything you'd want or need it for on a long spaceflight.
** "Space Whale", an asteroid shaped like a whale from Earth. A huge attraction and tourist trap in the Nemo system. Obviously inspired by the chat meme of Space Whales.
** "Lore Builder" is the [[InvokedTrope invocation]] of this trope, with the developers selecting segments of the universe that haven't been fleshed out and choosing the best submissions.
** The ship captain from the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vO7RxsZpcKc MISC Freelancer commercial]] has been named "Bob [=McCutcheon=], Totally Legitimate Freighter Captain" by forum-goers.
* DemandOverload:
** When crowdsourcing opened in October 2012, the custom-built website collapsed under the server load, costing Chris Roberts' project the early momentum. After they got the site working again a couple days later, they added a Website/{{Kickstarter}} to make up for lost time.
** In March 2023, the Alpha 3.18 update released, and the game's servers swiftly buckled from the load of so many players attempting to try it out at once. This seemed to cause some permanent damage, as several days later, the game was still experiencing outages.
* DuelingGames: With ''VideoGame/EliteDangerous'', the latest entry in the ''VideoGame/{{Elite}}'' series, though Chris Roberts personally backed ''Elite Dangerous's'' Kickstarter and encouraged his own backers to do the same, and David Braben of ''Elite'' is an alpha backer of ''VideoGame/StarCitizen''. It's extremely common to see people commenting on places like Reddit or [=YouTube=] that they "quit" Elite in order to back ''Star Citizen'', to the point where it's become a DiscussedTrope in the game community about how much of this is legitimate new users and how much is the CIG's AstroTurf marketing campaign that is run by the part Cloud Imperium owned, Canadian ViralMarketing company Turbulent.
* {{Feelies}}: Some editions of the game come with a physical map, a ship model, a set of five ship blueprints, and a USB stick shaped like a spaceship.
* ProductionPosse: Creator/MarkHamill and Creator/JohnRhysDavies have worked with Chris Roberts since ''[[VideoGame/WingCommanderTheKilrathiSaga Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger]]''.
* ScheduleSlip: The initial intended release date was November 2014, but between new features and production issues was rescheduled to early 2016 and missed that as well. Both the online and single player (Squadron 42) halves of the game blew past deadline after deadline. The development is so slow that even extreme delay predictions from 2016, like Squadron 42 not being finished until 2021 were proven woefully inadequate, and now what would have been an outlandish prediction like the Persistent Universe not being ready or feature complete until 2030 doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility.
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