It's a pretty cool vision, but it's just unlikely to succeed in my eyes, and that's why i didn't buy in.

Ambitious and such; the only other game I know of that tried it was Eve Online, which has tens of thousands of players in the same world, but which is limited to hundreds of players that can actually see each other.

I would be surprised if they reached "hundreds" of players in a single instance. I don't think thousands is ever going to be attainable for them. Unless they are somehow able to make some sudden breakthrough that's alluded them in the last decade plus of development.

At 10 Hz that is 40 million updates a second.

There are caches and prediction that can help but I ignore all gameplay in that number, it is just flying around.

That's how.

Combat is all about range, and if you're close enough too actually see the enemy ship models, you're probably about to explode.

I'll be amazed if Star Citizen ever comes close to the scale of EVE battles, though. There's so many technical challenges in making an MMO scale, especially when a game is so focused on graphical fidelity.

(Then again, EVE is a 20-year-old game at this point, and was designed for the limited PCs and bandwidth of the time. But I'm assuming that they're using modern top-end hardware for the servers, and they still struggle with the biggest battles)

They have several youtube videos on their channel where their game director has come out to talk about these projects in a technical manner. It's pretty neat.

[I say these things as a backer patiently waiting for more game]

The words they choose must serve the goal of their performance first, conveying technical meaning is a optional secondary requirement

Quantum is a system for simulating activity with economic impacts and determines how much of raw material or assembled products are available and where, how much things cost, how busy and how dangerous or safe space travel lanes are, and other such aspects of economic scaling.

Subsumption AI is used to drive NPC behavior up close. The game is supposed to have a population that is 90% AI NPCs that drive economic variation and action in general. This makes the game world seem alive even if there are no players currently with you in game. The NPCs have the ability to decide what to do, how to move around, make jokes and idle banter, and can use various equipment in the game as well as fight either in person or as spaceship pilots.

Not totally sure about pCache but it appears to be used on the server to capture changes to state in the universe that should be stored persistently. This is part of the server container streaming feature which allows servers to stream in areas and sets of objects as players approach and then stream them out when they are left empty for a time.