📋 New Feature – Bandwidth Canisters
Bandwidth Canisters have arrived, and they are the first piece of kit you activate rather than fit. A canister is a sealed uplink charge that floods your drone control bus with extra channel capacity. Crack one open and your ship can hold more drones in space than its hull alone allows, for four hours.
They stack in your hold like a Registry Transfer Permit, and you will find them in your Consumables list with a small activation icon beside the count. Green means your ship can run it, red means it cannot, and hovering over a red one will tell you why rather than leaving you guessing.
They come in three sizes, and what your ship can take depends on what your ship is. A frigate can run the smallest. Corvettes and mining hulls step up a size. Cruisers and destroyers can run the largest. This is deliberate. A canister is extra capacity for a bay that already exists, not a way to bolt a drone wing onto something that was never built to carry one, and the shuttle gets nothing at all because it has no drone bays.
Three things worth knowing before you spend one. They run in real time. The four hours start the moment you activate the canister and keep running whether you are in a fight, sitting at a station or logged off entirely. There is a small ring around the icon in the flight deck toolbar showing how much is left, and it turns amber when you are into the last half hour.
Only one at a time. Canisters do not stack with each other. If you try to activate a second while one is still running you will simply be told how long is left on the first. Nothing is wasted and nothing is quietly thrown away.
Changing ship ends it. If you swap hulls with a canister running, the boost goes with the old ship and the canister is not returned. The hangar will warn you before you confirm, so you will not do it by accident, but it is worth remembering before you go looking for a different ride halfway through.
When a canister runs out while you are in the field, nothing is destroyed. Your ship simply calls home whichever drones no longer fit your reduced Bandwidth, newest first, and they go back into your hold ready to launch again.
📋 New Feature – More Ship Items
Corvette captains have been fitting frigate guns since the day the class existed. That stops today. Corvettes now have an equipment class of their own, sitting between frigate and cruiser, with three new guns to go in it.
The Bastion Lance reaches furthest and hits hardest per shot. The Sablefire Cannon gives up that reach for rate of fire and wants to be close in. The Marauder Repeater sits between the two and will suit most captains most of the time. There is a Corvette Afterburner as well, so the class finally has its own overburn rather than borrowing the frigate one. Nothing your corvette could fit before has been taken away. The new class inherits everything beneath it, so your current loadout is untouched.
Destroyers get their first proper kit at the same time, and it is the heaviest equipment we have built. Three weapons, two shields and two reactors, all rated for destroyer hulls and nothing smaller. The guns deserve a word. On paper they land in much the same place, but they play nothing alike. The Ruination Siege Driver fires once every four seconds and takes a considerable bite out of whatever it hits. The Bulwark Point Defence fires almost twice as often for rather less each time. The Sovereign Main Battery sits between them. Which one suits you depends entirely on what you expect to be shooting at, and that is rather the point.
The shields and reactors are simply the largest afloat. A Maelstrom carrying the Paragon Aegis Lattice and a pair of Eventide Cores is a very serious ship indeed.