🚀 New Feature – Afterburner!
The Afterburner is a new System device, it’s a system device and turned on in the systems Section. It sits on your toolbar in combat, beside the shield booster. Press it and the Afterburner drives activate, your ship picks up a quarter of its speed again, and a trail of burning gas follows you across the field for twenty seconds.
Then the drives need thirty seconds to cool before you can do it again, counted from the moment the burn ends rather than from the moment you pressed it. There are four of them. The Military Afterburner for Frigates, the Miner Afterburner for mining hulls, and Cruiser and Destroyer versions for the heavier ships. Every one of them gives the same twenty five percent.
That is a percentage rather than a flat figure, which is the opposite of the choice we made for the mining boosters, and for the opposite reason. A Stripminer labours along at eighty and a Hawk cruises at a hundred and thirty. A flat bonus would have been worth most to the fast ship that hardly needs it, and least to the slow one trying to get out of trouble. A quarter of your speed is a quarter of your speed whatever you happen to be flying. Here is the part worth reading twice.
Each Afterburner fits its own class of hull and nothing else. This is the first equipment in the galaxy that does not pass down the ladder, so a Cruiser cannot reach down and fit the cheaper Frigate version the way it can with armour plating. If you want a Cruiser moving, you build the Cruiser one. The item panel will tell you plainly which hulls a fitting will accept, and whether you are allowed more than one, before you commit anything to building it.
They do stack. Nothing stops you filling every System slot you own with burners, and a Cruiser running three of them shifts at seventy five percent above its normal pace. What stacks is the thrust and only the thrust. Three burners will not keep you lit any longer, and they will not shorten the wait afterwards. Whether surrendering your derelict scanner and your docking hatch for that turn of speed is clever or foolish is, as ever, between you and whatever is chasing you.
The Marauder has no System slots at all, so the starter hull sits this one out. Blueprints for all four are in the Blueprint Store.
✨ Improvement
If your guns have looked different this week, they are. We have been working through the weapons one at a time, giving each kind its own way of firing instead of every gun in the galaxy throwing the same coloured line at whatever it is pointed at. Mass drivers and twin drivers now throw actual shells, lit steel with a tracer trailing behind them, because a driver fires a solid round and it should never have looked like a laser in the first place.
Missiles (when released) will fly like missiles and now arrive on the ship they were aimed at, rather than at the patch of empty space it occupied when you pulled the trigger. Plasma weapons throw a fat glowing bolt. Arc weapons fork like the lightning they are.
Around twenty captains will have seen their kinetic weapons change without any warning from us. Nothing about those weapons actually moved. Same damage, same range, same rate of fire, purely a new coat of paint on something that had been wearing the wrong one.
There is more of this built and waiting in the wings. Some of it behaves like nothing currently in the racks, and it is not ready to be named yet. It will find its way onto real weapons when it is.