Houston, we have a potential space problem. No, everything's fine with the space ship but our hard drives may need a little cleaning. You see, Star Citizen, the little crowd funded space simulator that could, may just end up pushing our hard drives and download limits to the furthest reaches of deep space. That being, an installation of up to 100GB of intergalactic space data and patches in the outer regions of 20GB.

With crowd funding for Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts' space simulator Star Citizen sitting just shy of $75 million dollars comes word from the Roberts Space Industries forum that the game client could end up being around 100GB (that's Gigabytes) of data. According to director of game operations Jeremy Masker,

"The game compression and asset removal is unlikely to yield such high gains that we will be able to reduce our client size to 30-40GB. The size and number of assets that are left to deliver means that our client size is much more likely to be 100GB."

Not only that but patch sizes are expected to be pretty big too,

"Each patch has 100s of assets, each of these assets are at times 200MB, this leads to 2-6GB patches, and if we end up doing a file type re-factor and have to re-download 30-40% of the assets on the hard-drive, then the patch will be 14-20GB."

With the sheer scope and size of Star Citizen this shouldn't really come as a surprise, but this news definitely puts the game's ambition into the correct perspective. Also, it gives new meaning to the phrase, "Space, the final frontier."