How 'manual space flight' became first-ever Starfield community meme

sportskeeda.com:

The release of Starfield, Bethesda Game Studio's first new IP in 25 years, is only seven months away.

Much to the chagrin of an already hyped-up community, there has been no direct indication of a Starfield gameplay reveal. Mere months before Bethesda's biggest game in decades, its followers have been left spitballing and chewing on fan theories about how it might play.

The relative discrepancy between the bubbling community hype and how little information Bethesda has put out about gameplay, even verbally, means there is a lot of theorycrafting.

The publisher has left its community in the dark to an extent where enthusiasts cannot say whether this game about space travel will have manual space flight.

For that matter, 'manual space flight' is such an oft-quoted central quandary in Starfield that it has taken up the status of a meme. Even mentioning it in a post in the r/Starfield subreddit may de-legitimize its sincerity and get it downvoted to oblivion.

In a post claiming that every ounce of speculation has been exhausted till the gameplay reveal, one user said:

It all arguably started with a now-infamous dubious lead from BethesdaAsia's bilibili post in the game. It was simply the bilibili outlet for the mini-featurette about Vasco the Constellation robot companion that Bethesda put out a few weeks ago.

The original Reddit post speculating that the 'lead' was, at best, a very wishful overanalysis of the phrasing in the bilibili post, which roughly translates to "Vasco... can help you fly the ship."

Already hardened by numerous shaky dead-end Starfield rumors over the year, few fell for it. This, however, is arguably what pushed it across the threshold of memes from the domain of a serious question.

However, the centrality of a