Truly outstanding stuff indeed. It's just that looking at the absolute maniac detail level the ship's got, it's not hard to understand why many other things in the game are taking this long to take form. For now it seems that they're just adding full detail to everything, only to figure out later if they can have stuff of this complexity interact with an increasingly busy world. Still, if you're a 3D artist who loves working on space ships and space tech in general, working on this project must be some sort of wet dream as you can keep on spawning better and better ships for what will probably account to over a decade, without the technical department necessarily having to figure out how that's gonna be balanced anytime soon.
A bit of a "what if" situation if some triple-A dev with incredible artists had literally money growing on trees, never to worry about deadlines, optimization and whatnot. It produces incredible art like the screens in this thread, but I have to wonder when will it reach the state of a complete-ish game feature- and optimization-wise, and if by then they won't have to downgrade or simply some things. I'm not invested in Star Citizen money-wise but I'd pay money to play a full-blown campaign (and MMO) with this absurd level of detail, although I realize I'd probably get lost in the complexity of the game rather quickly. Even if I could just explore these worlds in those ships on next-gen consoles without technical issues would be quite something to me, because it's clear that (as with many other things) this project sees artists have practically no boundaries. It produces incredible art and screenshots indeed, we'll see how the rest holds up.