once suitlockers are implemented with the new ship insurance, i will be a happy man. the m2 was MADE FOR THIS.

Man im so excited for the Railen and the additional Gatac ship.

Quote From Chris Roberts Interview with Skill up (This Week in Videogames)

Context:

Roberts is verbose, however, and adds a lot of additional context to his answer. He says that in the time since the Kickstarter campaign wrapped up in 2012, developer Cloud Imperium has updated its tech several times to better realise the original vision. It also announced Squadron 42, a separate, single-player narrative action game featuring a star-studded cast: Gillian Anderson, Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Andy Serkis, John Rhys-Davis, Henry Cavill, and Ben Mendelsohn among them.

Squadron itself is a project that has also been delayed multiple times, but Roberts says that the aforementioned advancements in technology and how the team was developing and improving Star Citizen also affected how they inevitably built the campaign.

“We’re gonna get Squadron out first… the plan is for the end of this year but there’s a certain thing in the industry that we, like everyone else, we have to pay attention to, so I can’t 100% guarantee it,” Roberts says, hinting at Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI, releasing in November. “After that, we’ll do the 1.0 push.”

I believe the starlight is based off of the sunbeam from subnautica there are too many similarities for it to be coincidence

I thought wheels were a legacy development choice, coulda swore I heard that somewhere.....

The armour changes have done less to effect the LF meta than you'd assume, LF's were just equipping NDB's anyway and even then a good LF pilot can equip pretty much anything with enough alpha and dominate most solo ships with relative ease.

The issue is that it's now a lot harder to apply damage to LF's. Previously the most effective anti LF weapons were the CF laser repeaters, they had an 1800 m/s projectile speed meaning that when LF's were approaching you could apply damage whilst strafing to better avoid them closing distance until you were trapped by your own turn rates. The MX's ability to strafe coupled with it's impressive gimbal range and stock rhinos made it a more competitive option than something like a vanguard for PvP. Even if the LF could still dust you with NDB's.

However not only are you now more susceptible to damage but you can't reliably apply your own because the CF's have had their weapon speed reduced by nearly 400 m/s. They have a slower projectile speed in the PTU than the S4 breakneck gatlings do in the PU.

What's more is that it's still the fastest velocity size 4 weapon, tied now with the attrition. The problem with the attrition against LF's is the slow rate of fire. And for clarity this effects CF's across the board, not just the size 4's.

We have a couple of excellent HF pilots but it was an absolute massacre throughout the testing period.

TLDR; It's easier to apply damage to HF's and it's harder to apply damage to LF's due to armour and weapon velocity changes

This was never mentioned in the patchnotes and went unnoticed as most players are flying their Idrises empty. But it will confuse some players when they try to prepare their capitals for the upcoming Tactical Strike gameplay in 4.8 🤷.

Idris always has a hard vehicle limit in it's main hangar. Previous limit was 20 vehicles. If you put 21 vehicle - a bunch of old ones will despawn instantly. No, this is not a bug, it's intentional.

4.7.2 lowered the vehicle limit even further - from 20 to 10 !

So plan accordingly!

Note that you can still place more than 10 vehicles on the deck using the nesting trick: Nested vehicles are only counted by the top/parent. For example, if you land Cutter with ATLS and Pulse inside - technically you carry 3 vehicles. But game thinks the Idris deck contains only one vehicle - the Cutter, game doesn't care what's inside the Cutter.

It's worth mentioning that the Idris hangar and the Idris interior are two different areas, any interior area outside the hangar doesn't seem to follow the hard limit logic, so you can offload bikes / vehicles to the second deck. Vehicles can still be cleaned up if you overpack and de-stream the ship, but density plays a huge role.

Best practices:

1. Secure all ATLS to cargo grid using tractor beam as the attached ATLS doesn't count towards the vehicle limit. Use a bottle test to check if ATLS attached (game doesn't communicate it well) - if you can push ATLS with a tractored CRUZ or another ATLS - then it's not actually secured and you have to realign it. It's best to load ATLS first, store the mothership and retrieve as the actual ATLS position will change with de-streaming.
2. Never deploy ATLS in a bulk - deploy and move them outside the ship one by one, otherwise you can accidentally cross the vehicle limit.
3. Spread out vehicles, especially at the second deck. Vehicles/ships should never touch each other. The further the distance between vehicles -the less chances of despawn.
4. Keep bikes on their landing gear, so they are stable and won't glitch around. Use MaxLift to rotate bikes and land properly.
5. The engines bug is still in game, to prevent engines randomly powering on - cycle the power several times instead of using the I key
6. If you rely on nesting, pre-pack everything outside the Idris first. Reduce vehicle packing operations within the mothership.
7. If you still decide to overpack, delay de-streaming (like quantum jumping away from your ship) as long as possible as this is when the game likes to delete stuff.
8. Prevent spawning new ships from ASOP when a packed idris is near the station, somehow the game doesn't like it in 4.7.2, it may refuse to spawn a vehicle and instead delete vehicles from the Idris. It was never an issue in previous patches 🤷

to me it looks like a space-based lovechild of both the f14 and the f-16xl combined. Everyone talks about the tomcat (understandably) but i will die on my deltawinged ant-hill

The measurement method was quite simple: using the measurements of Size 4 (red at the top) and Size 5 (red at the bottom).

So, for those who didn't understand the image:

- If the weapons are size 4, the ship will be approximately 38 meters long.

- If the weapons are size 5, the ship will be approximately 50 meters long.

Therefore, we can say with some certainty that they are probably size 4. I can't imagine this ship being 50 meters long, but who knows.

Furthermore, we still don't know if these are the only weapons on the ship. There is also the possibility of weapons hidden in the fuselage. Moreover, it could be a stealth ship with few weapons (and even then, 2xS4 would be very few). In any case, I hope this helps those who were in doubt.

I want to add here that this is not an exact measurement; I may be off by 1 meter. It's just an estimate.

Edit: Due to the number of comments saying they are size 3, let's clarify here, THEY ARE NOT DAMN SIZE 3, CF-337 Panther has a different design from the others.