📋 New Feature – Destroyers
Three Destroyers are now available, and they are the largest hulls anyone has flown. The Maelstrom is built to stand still and win. Six weapon mounts, three shield banks, the thickest plating in the game and the slowest engines in it, which is entirely deliberate. It is not built to catch anything. It is built to arrive, stop, and still be there when the other side has run out of ships.
The Typhoon is its opposite number, and the larger cousin of the Rapier. Four of its five mounts take missile launchers, it carries the deepest energy reserve and the longest detection range of any hull, and its armour is thin for something of that size. It expects to see the fight coming and finish it before anyone reaches it. Captains who remember the first half of that and forget the second tend to only need telling once.
The Eyrie is the third, and it has been sitting half finished in the yards for some time. It is a drone carrier, built around its bays rather than its guns, so it gives up the Maelstrom’s broadside and the Typhoon’s reach and spends the difference on control channels. What it brings to a fight is a swarm rather than a salvo, and nothing else in the game comes close to the number of drones it will hold. It is properly finished now, with art of its own instead of the borrowed silhouette it has been wearing, and for the first time it can actually be built.
Most of you have some climbing to do first, though I’ve lowered the Eyrie to make it reachable. They are expensive in materials, and as always the figure shown in the Item Database is honest about what you will have to gather. Destroyers also draw noticeably larger on the navigation map now, which we think they have earned.
📋 New Feature – Reactor Bonus
Elsewhere, reactors have become more useful. Several hulls now add a percentage of their fitted reactors’ output on top of their energy pool, so the same reactor gives you more headroom on the right ship. It applies to the mining hulls, the cruisers and the new destroyers, and the better the reactor you fit, the more it is worth. You do not need to do anything to claim it. Every affected ship has already been updated, parked ones included, so if your energy reads higher than you remember, that is why.
🔧 Bug Fix
Our thanks to Orge Snorrsen, who noticed that shield regeneration was being advertised per second when it actually arrives in one lump every eight seconds. Your shields were always recovering at the rate they were supposed to. Only the label was wrong, and it has been corrected everywhere it appeared, including one panel that had been quietly disagreeing with itself. Finally, ships have been redrawn. If your hull looks sharper than it did yesterday, that is not your imagination.
Our thanks to Droffy, Grim Gabe and Thedoki, who between them reported two halves of the same problem and made it a great deal easier to find. Droffy and Grim Gabe had been working the asteroid fields in Portal together, mining and fighting. Then one of them would leave, or get killed, and on coming back the field would be wrong. Different rocks, different pirates, and no sign of the captain they had been flying alongside a minute earlier. They were, as Droffy put it, looking at two different copies of the same field.
Thedoki found the other face of it, flying alone. He would clear a field of pirates, leave it, come back, and find the whole thing reset, with the wrecks gone and every pirate returned. He tested it repeatedly across several fields, cleared his cache to rule that out, and pointed out that it was not waiting the five minutes it should have done. He was right, and that detail was the thread we pulled.
This had been happening since the last day of August, to every field in the galaxy, whether you were flying alone or with company. If you have lost a cleared field on a cargo run, or found a friend mysteriously absent after a trip back to dock, that was this, and it was not you. It is fixed. A field now stays exactly as you left it for a full five minutes after the last captain leaves, and we have added a check that will make this particular mistake loud and obvious if anyone ever manages to make it again.