✨ Improvement
Shuttle – Autopilot
The Shuttle has finally found its calling, and we have Droffy and Drylok to thank between them for pointing at it. The Shuttle exists to get you from one place to another and to do nothing else at all. No guns, no mining lasers, barely any cargo. Which made it faintly ridiculous that the one device built for exactly that job, the Autopilot, was the one thing it could not carry. It can now. A Shuttle has a single Autopilot Slot, and that is all it will ever hold. No weapons, no scanners, no docking hatches.
One navigation computer, in a hull built around the idea of going somewhere. Two things had to move to allow it. The Autopilot used to draw more power than a Shuttle has to give, so its power draw has come down a long way. If you already had one fitted, the difference has been handed straight back to your ship and you will find more energy free than you had yesterday.
✨ Autopilot Speed
The second one is more interesting, and it applies to everybody. Until now an autopilot journey took the same length of time whatever you were flying. A heavy mining barge and a light frigate arrived at the same moment, which meant the speed printed on your ship did nothing whatsoever on the one journey where you would most expect it to count.
Speed now decides how long an autopilot run takes. Quicker hulls arrive sooner, and speed modules count towards it. Nothing has been made slower, so if you fly something heavy your journeys are exactly as they were, and if you fly something light you will notice it on a long run across several systems. The Shuttle, being the fastest thing in the galaxy by a comfortable margin, gets there in half the time. Which is rather the entire point of owning one. Thanks Droffy, thanks Drylok. Between you, you have made a ship worth flying.
✨ Asteroid Pirates Fighting Back!
Something has changed out in the belts, and the pirates started it. Word has been moving between the gangs. Killing one of theirs in an asteroid field used to be a private matter, handled one ship at a time and replaced at their leisure. That arrangement is over. The gangs have agreed among themselves that a belt where their people keep dying is a belt worth defending properly, and they have started answering in numbers rather than one by one.
The authorities noticed before anyone else did, and sent out a patch to every ship scanner in the galaxy has been updated to carry a new reading. Look to the top right of your combat screen when in an Asteroid Field, and you will find Pirate Field Threat, sitting at zero when you arrive somewhere quiet. It climbs as pirates die there, whoever does the killing, and it belongs to the field rather than to you.
Everyone working the same rocks reads the same number. Below seventy percent nothing much has changed, although replacements do now arrive rather more promptly than they used to. Past seventy the gangs stop trickling and start sending groups, and those groups grow as the number climbs. Your scanner marks that point on the bar, so you can watch it coming rather than discover it the hard way.
There is a mercy in it. Pirates hold a grudge but they do not hold it for long, and a belt left to itself loses interest entirely. Clear out, let the field go quiet, and whatever they had agreed about you is forgotten by the time anyone comes back. The starter fields around Feris are untouched by all of this. Whatever the gangs have decided among themselves, nobody has suggested taking it out on a captain still working out which end of a mining laser points at the rock.
🔧 Bug Fix
Droffy spotted that the shield bar was not keeping up with itself. Run a Shield Booster and the number beside your shields climbs steadily, exactly as you would expect. The blue bar underneath it dawdled along behind and never quite caught up, which made it look as though something was going wrong with the boost. Nothing was. Both were reading the same shields the whole time. The bar was simply easing itself along far too slowly, so it spent the whole boost a moment behind the number it was meant to be showing. It has been retuned.
The bar keeps pace with the number now, while still gliding rather than lurching when a repair drone lands a large lump of shields on you all in one go. One thing that is not a fault, in case it looks like one. The bar changes colour as your shields pass a quarter, a half and three quarters full, so a shield climbing up from very low will change colour two or three times on the way. That is deliberate, and it works the same way out in open space. Thanks Droffy. That one was easy to see and hard to believe.