TL;DR: Started experimenting with a $50, 13-year-old "best money can buy" build and a collection of obsolete NVIDIA GPUs to see whether they could run modern LLMs. Ended up building a functioning, locally hosted, voice-controlled AI bridge crew for Star Citizen, with five specialist AI officers coordinated by an executive AI called Riker(I know, but I had to call it something). The next goal is to give each officer independent visual awareness, autonomous decision-making, and the ability to communicate naturally with the captain, commander and each other.

This project started with a simple question: could I make obsolete NVIDIA Kepler GPUs run modern AI models?

Using an ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition, an i7-4960X, and a collection of GTX Titan cards, I eventually got five Kepler GPUs working with legacy CUDA drivers and a patched llama.cpp. Qwen2.5-32B ran at roughly 2.8 tokens per second, which was hardly impressive. But running five independent 7B models produced around 72 tokens per second in aggregate.

That got me thinking. Instead of having five models doing the same thing, why not give each one a job?

And that's how BigBoy Kepler became AI Bridge Crew.

The system consists of five AI specialists: Helm, Tactical, Engineering, Sensors, and Communications. Each handles a specific operational area of a spacecraft, while a separate executive AI coordinates the crew, interprets commands, and manages responses.

I also developed Eyes, a custom python application that observes Star Citizen's HUD and MFDs and extracts live telemetry, including speed, fuel, power allocation, shields, contacts, and ship damage. That information feeds into the crew's operational awareness rather than relying entirely on information invented by the language models.

The system already works. Using push-to-talk, Whisper speech recognition, and Kokoro speech synthesis, I can speak directly to Riker. I can request an all-stations report and receive individual responses from each specialist, followed by Riker's summary. One complete test delivered the first voice response in 6.47 seconds.

Riker also maintains persistent operational information, remembers contracts across restarts, and can retrieve live UEX commodity and trading data. You can ask "Riker. Wheres the best place to buy Gold?" And Riker will answer location and price. Works with items too.

This is just whats been done so far.

The next stage is changing how Eyes works. Rather than simply extracting and interpreting HUD information centrally, Eyes will identify Areas of Interest and send the relevant images directly to individual specialists. Each specialist will use vision-capable models to analyse its own displays, maintain situational awareness, and draw conclusions independently. Each will have its own state engine and database, so it can keep things in memory, like the different layouts of ships, HUDs, MFDs and other relevant information.

Engineering will understand component health, power distribution, cooling, and damage. Tactical will evaluate threats, weapons, and defensive capability. Helm will monitor navigation and flight conditions. Sensors will track and identify contacts. Communications responsibilities will increasingly be integrated into Riker.

Each officer will also have its own priorities and operational thresholds. They won't need to be asked about everything. If Engineering detects a critical failure or Tactical identifies an incoming missile, they should interrupt and report it automatically.

The other major goal is proper conversational interaction between the crew.

I want to be able to ask Riker for a damage assessment, have Riker order Engineering to report, and hear Engineering respond with "Commander..." before delivering its findings. Riker should acknowledge that report, potentially consult another officer, and then brief the captain. Every exchange will be generated and voice-rendered, with officers maintaining their own responsibilities and context.

None of that full inter-officer conversation and autonomous reporting system is implemented yet, but it's where the project is heading.

Hardware upgrades are also planned, replacing Kepler with Pascal GPUs to support more capable specialist models and eventually direct visual analysis. There's plenty of work ahead on latency, memory, coordination, and ship-specific awareness.

The ultimate goal isn't five chatbots pretending to be spaceship officers. It's an autonomous, conversational bridge crew that understands what's happening aboard your ship, coordinates its own specialists, alerts you when something matters, and responds naturally to orders.

All running locally, without depending on cloud AI services.

What started as "Can these ancient GPUs run an LLM?" has turned into "Can I build a local AI bridge crew for Star Citizen?"

I am building this for me out of curiosity and boredom, but is there anything any one else could see a use for this? I am tossing up whether to build a modular installer because not everyone else has 30GB of Kepler laying around.

Edit: Full disclosure, I used Codex to do my UI work. I am terrible at that part. Its not a skill I have. I am a DevOps Engineer, so I can do the complicated systems work and engine stuff, but I am horrible at UI.

At least it looks like an eclipse, thought it was neat in either case.

The YouTube Channel of "Star Citizen" and "RobertSpaceInd" have new Posts in the post section about the Giveaway, check this out!

Love the purple

Stopped by after work to get a video, sorry to all the conspiracy theorists. There's a couple of hopeful dating candidates at the end if anyone is interested.

So my friend did something to his Perseus that triggered emergency mode and locked all the doors.
When we tried to fix it, we got the rave lights :3

Do you have any song recommendations that match the vibe?

Mvh. Lark

After spending the weekend in Manchester w/ friends testing out Squadron 42, speaking w/ Mark Hamill, catching up w/ Chris & Sandi, and experiencing the Manchester night life (they get down for days at a time...), I've finally recovered enough to have clarity of thought on SQ42. (Even w/ having a baby girl this past Tuesday).

Playing Star Citizen last night, walking around in a new ship, and seeing the verse, only made me envision what it will be like when the tech from SQ42 comes over to Star Citizen, because as fun as SC has been for me over the years, after just 1 weekend w/ SQ42 my perspective on SC has changed. Star Citizen is going to be, a 2nd life. That is what Chris and his team have set a path for. SQ42, makes you want to take your time, see and experience the world around you, get to know your shipmates, hear their stories, watch the news, try out the various ship (Idris) facilities, mess hall foods, simulators, arcade games, armory, and so much more...

I walk around my new ship in Star Citizen, w/ a ghostly vision of the likely future of SC w/ SQ42 tech, and I'm completely and utterly blown away.

SQ42 = 8.9

I give it this score as I'm knowingly biased. I don't enjoy single player games, I don't enjoy puzzle games, I don't enjoy playing alone as that time could be spent playing w/ friends. But SQ42, painted a picture, created a living world around me, made me feel like my character wasn't just some main character, but an individual surrounded by so many others who were just as important, who cared about my success and the success of others around them.

I got goosebumps in 3 separate instances playing SQ42.

You can't fake goosebumps...

After getting through the initial "welcome to the s*it", that's when the opening credits started, and I'm like "damn, I'm in for it..." that's when I 1st got up from my PC to walk around to regroup. I think that's when someone in my group cried a bit.

Audio = 10/10 no notes. In fact, they gave us a cassette tape, I hate them and love them for this...

Graphics = moot point. Yes incredible, but more importantly, it should run well on various system configurations, and I'm pushing for it to run w/ a good experience on a 1080ti. A 2070 GPU should be fine as of right now.

If you can afford it, a monitor w/ RGB Stripe technology is what you want due to the large amount of text in game. Wait for prices to come down around when SQ42 launches.

VR = Wait for it... And what I mean by that is, there are no VR headsets out that will do SQ42 justice. YES, there are plenty to choose from that are available today, but what you will want, I'll talk about at CES 2027 (January 2027). Don't waste money on a Steam Frame for example if you want to play SQ42.

VR gives you an actual sense of scale, for example, a small single seater ship, is actually HUGE!

SQ42 is a Chris Roberts / Wing Commander game. Part cinematic story movie, part heart pounding gameplay. If you like Dungeons and Dragons, there is a lot for you here. Same for Battlefield, Planet Side, Flight Simulator, No Mans Sky, Minesweeper, Chess, Diablo, EverQuest, CSGO, APEX Legends, and so many popular titles over the decades. It's not for everyone, but I do believe everyone will find something in SQ42 that they will be amazed about, and potentially be like me, and want to play more.

Thank you for the experience, and I only wish more people could have attended this incredible weekend.

Phoenix decoration is pretty nice, all things considered. Due to the new code for placing physical items, it's also pretty stable. I've noticed placeable items consistently floating on ships, which sucks.

Side note: this is the Polaris' mess hall lights completely on. It's such a dark ship. I find myself really wanting to decorate the Polaris to soften it up and give it some much needed personality on the interior. Not much I can do about the lighting, though.

Is this an old reliant model or something? Never heard anything about it and just saw it in this clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE0o_g2hMbk

UPDATE:

Thanks guys! Its just an old placeholder asset that was probably bought here:

https://www.deviantart.com/slingblade87/art/Kal-class-Starfighter-696869824

Quite a hard choice between Star Kitten Deskmat - Merchandise | RSI Store

And Big Benny’s Deskmat - Merchandise | RSI Store

😜

They did such a great job with that exterior rework they did a while back.

Area 18 was my first home location. Then when Orison came to the PU that was my new favorite for years. More recently I switched to Lorville (maybe a year ago now) and I'm still not tired of it.

I don't spend a lot of time on the ground at my home location (I prefer to go to stations for supplies) so for me it's all about how it feels to leave or come back, and in my opinion Lorville is top tier for the vibes.

I still prefer the other cities when it comes to actual design once you're inside them though.

I'm just coming back to SC since the low 3.xx versione. I am liking a lot of the storage and ui changes. This bug made me laugh though.

Recent discussion of ship redesign reminded me that I had some old screenshots that included the original Freelancer model. I seem to remember that it never flew. Not sure if that is right, but it was redesigned early. Also some images of the Constellation from early days, plus a few random shots of old armor and Cutlass interior.

In celebration of RSI discovery month, I wanted to share this RSI undersuit commercial I made for a video I’m working on. I’ve always loved it because it reminds of Raiden’s skull suit from metal gear solid 2, what’s your favorite undersuit?

Give me my Arrastra plz