So today, fans from about 1800 miles away came down just to bring us a couple dozen pounds of BBQ & gallons of booze for lunch. I love my job. <3
Oh, and there's been a bit of speculation over the overall tone of the game in this thread as to 'what will make it different,' or 'how will this be different from X3/freelancer/ect.' And I think some info mentioned during the NVidia meetup* helps to clarify it a bit. First, 75% of backers surveyed were above the age of 25. Second, based on unique credit card info, the average backer gave around $140. Additionally, this will not be a release-and-forget game. The goal is to create a living universe. Add all these things up, and the result is a game being created for a very mature audience to play over the long term. Not 'console-kiddie mature' as in tits, booze, and swearing, but as in an actually mature audience consisting of working adults who want more than simplistic COD-in-space dogfights. It is oriented around action of course; Chris Roberts is very specific in the fact that he doesn't want Eve's boring "Spreadsheets In Space." But that action will be based on much more nuanced simulation; both in the game world and in the ships themselves. For ships themselves, think less Freelancer's damage model, and more Dwarf Fortress' damage model.
There's also the ongoing development bit of it. Quite frankly, unless we ran out of people giving us the money to stay afloat, I'm pretty sure Chris Roberts would be perfectly content with continuing development until the day he died. I think a telling example of this is from one of the previous Wingman's Hangar answers. When asked about whether ship models would be updated much like real world auto models are, his response was that they would be periodically released. That much like a 2013 Toyota Corolla is much different from a 2003 or 1983 Toyota Corolla, the ship models would be updated over time with small revisions and redesigns.
*which is largely NDA, so this is the extent to which I will refer to it; these facts are either public or close enough to public that mentioning them doesn't matter