There was a lot of speculation and a couple of leaks prior to the ship being activated in the game, but now it's here and I have all the details on the newest ship in the Elite: Dangerous shipyard.

What has become clear is that the data-mined information leak was more accurate, or at least less misleading that the XBOX video leak. For example, the stock ship does cost 124,755,342 CR, but the power plant is NOT Class 6 it is Class 8 but comes with the 1750CR Class 6E Power plant fitted instead of a 1,750,00CR Class 8E Power plant (those cheapskates at Lakon!). The FSD supplied is a 6E, but the slot is a Class 7. These made the specifications that appeared in the video a red herring.

So here are the speculation-free 100% accurate, taken-from-the-ship, specifications of the Type-10 Defender.

Looks

The ship is a shaved-down Type-9, but the spolier and folding wing-tips, along with the abundant engine ports, make this ship look very "race tuned".  It is not going to win any beauty contests, but it reminds me very much of the old Thunderbird 2 International Rescue craft, with it's massive size and stubby bulk and huge engines.

Weapons

With nine hardpoints, this ship has a lot of sustainable firepower. Lacking any huge hard-points it is designed to be able to "tough it out" for a long battle, making this an ideal PvE combat ship and most especially one that can take the pounding dished out by Thargoids.

The two Class 1 (small) hard-points are located on the front of the ship either side of the cockpit.

There are then two Class 2 (medium) and two Class 3 (large) hard-points located on the top edge of the ship with the medium hard-point leading.

Then there are two Class 3 (large) hard-points on the underside off the outer engine bulkheads and a single Class 2 (medium) hard-point on the underside off the ship's belly, dead-centre.

In the screen shot above, you can see the Ship Launched Fighter bay lit at the dead-centre of the ship' rear underside.

Handling and speed

With Class 7 Thrusters, same as the Type-9 and more weight, you'd expect this thing to handle like a brick in a pool of treacle, but you'd be wrong! While it isn't going to fly like an Eagle, it turns about the same as an Anaconda with D rated Thrusters. Given a Grade 5 Dirty Drive tuning, it handles even better.

The stock speed is 179m/s, but even with over 3,000 armour on mine, with the dirty drives it cruises at 230m/s and boosts to 280m/s.

The all-important jump range

With a Class 7A FrameShift Drive fitted the ship has a fairly respectable 18.6Ly range fully loaded with armour and module reinforcement. However, a grade 5 engineer upgrade took my jump range to 24ly, which meant when jumping down from Shinrata Dezra to Maia, my ship made 22 jumps, while my wingmate in a maxed-out and engineered Fer-De-Lance took more than 30 jumps with his max range of 16ly.

For such a massive ship, this beast is more comparible with the Cutter in firepower and jump range - certainly my Corvette would not keep up with it.

Does it do what it was built for?

In the name of science, not fun (honest!), we took some Type-10's out to HIP 17694 and attacked a Cyclops Thargoid and despite our ineptitude, we were victorious!

It took two tries and on the first, I got destroyed! But when you enjoy losing 17M CR in rebuy, then you know Frontier have got it right.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve been attacked by Thargoids – the alien insect race with bio-mechanical spacecraft – who’ve been probing us, building planet bases and destroying ships around the Pleiades sector for months.

Now, they’ve gone a step further and attacked three stations

• Oracle station in Pleiades Sector IR-W D1-55
• Titan’s Daughter in Taygeta
• Liman Legacy in HIP 16753

The stations are in a bit of a state.

Frontier released a video (sadly on YouTube and not in the game) which shows news reports and panic as people on the stations are needing to be evacuated. It’s a cool video and sets up the atmosphere of a system under attack.

So what can you do?

Not many commanders have the money or resources to pimp out a full anti-xeno ship (although CMDR Gluttony Fang has written an excellent post on the forums on how to do exactly this) which means your war-effort must be offered in other ways.

Rescuing the poor people on these stations and ferrying them to the rescue ships is something non-combat commanders can do. You will need to equip your ship first.

• Heat-sinks - the damaged stations are very hot because of fires and the failure of the heat dispersal systems.
• Passenger cabins - economy class cabins of any size! Store those cargo racks and armour, then fit some rescue seats!
• A fuel scoop - it's a long trip from the bubble and you're not going to help anyone if you run out of fuel and need rescuing yourself.

With your ship fitted out, you'll need to jump down to the Pleiades Sector IR-W D1-55 system (which is the nearest to the bubble). You can see all the stations damaged or under repair in the galaxy map. Go to the last TAB and look at the bottom of the list. Frontier have sneakily added two new options, "Show Damaged Starports" and "Show Repairing Starports".

I suspect we're going to see a lot of these on our galaxy map Soon^TM. Why?

Big bad just got bigger

CMDR CookieJarviz posted this image of the newly encountered "Medusa" class Thargoid ship (Threat level 7). Walk away. Slowly...

CMDR Alan Marchman posted an amazing photo of one on Reddit. Needless to say, you don't want to get THAT close!

Fly safe out there commanders, because we're not alone!

I've made adjustments to scale since initial measurements were not accurate enough and I have also added the inner cylinder.

The two versions are now linked on the original BluePrint post here: https://elite-dangerous-blog.co.uk/post/Elite-Dangerous-Ship-Blueprints-23-Update

Following a request from CMDR Andrew Indelicate from Facebook's Mobius PvE page, I've stuck a Beluga Liner in the access corridor - CMDR Vincent Chu demonstrated that the Beluga's folding tail makes little or no difference to the overall height when the landing gear comes down.

My original assertion that the station was over 3km across was incorrect and the figure is a little over 2km, which makes it more or less as wide as the Farragut (which I have also recently redrawn). The pads in the cylinder are red for large, orange for medium and cyan for small. The diameter of the cylinder should be very accurate, but the length is an approximation based on the depth of the access corridor.

The Type-10 Defender

UPDATE: Due to a short-lived bug in 2.4, CMDR Eric Grovum was able to in the shipyard on the XBOX version of Elite. Sadly, he didn’t have the funds to purchase the ship, but what he did grab added to our overall knowledge. We got a general peek at the shape and some extra stats.

So what’s changed?

We now know the cost will be 124,755,342 CR, which as theorised, is between the Anaconda and Type-9 stablemate. The Defender image shows the little winglets deployed and a very noticeable spoiler (which we saw in photos at the the Frontier Expo and assumed was a ship kit).

The ship description is:

The Type-10 Defender is the result of collaboration between the Alliance and Lakon Spaceways. With the threat of xeno-war looming, the Alliance’s naval arm saw the urgent need for a weapons platform capable of withstanding heavy, sustained attack. Utilising a reinforced Type-9 chassis as a starting point, Lakon overhauled and geared every aspect of the design for combat, producing a military behemoth that could be produced in volume at short notice.

The hardpoints are not the same as previously thought, with 4 large, 4 small (not 1) and 1 medium (not 3) which lowers the calculated firepower factor to 18 (from 20) and with the core internals being identical to the Type-9, the FSD and power plant are the same. This is not-so-good news. It means this beasty will be armoured out the wazoo, but will fly like a whale and while it's firepower theoretically could match a cutter, it lacks the power systems to run many energy weapons, so this will rely on kinetic weapons to keep the hurt coming in combat.

Thanks to the description we know this will be the first Alliance ship in the game.

Strangely for this heavier (and lower jump range) variant of the Type-9, the cruise and boost speeds are higher! Does this mean the ship will be more agile than the Type-9? Maybe. But unless it is impossibly agile, then this ship is going to rely heavily on turrets and the deployed SLF.

It won't outrun a Thargoid (or anything else for that matter) but it will probably take extreme amounts of punishment and still limp away.

As long as the power-plant will take it, Class 8 shields plus all that armour will make it THE in-game ship-tank. People are going to have a lot of fun in outfitting with this one.

What we (think we) know so far…

The Type-10 Defender is a Lakon ship and a variant of the Type-9 Heavy transport ship. We’ve seen clips of the ship in Frontier's Beyond teaser video and it has a lot more engine power on display than it’s stable-mate.

Recently a CMDR anonymously posted game-data mined from Elite: Dangerous that reveals yet more details of this as-yet-unreleased ship. The data gives us a wealth of information about the ship and it’s place in the game.

Stuff we didn’t know

The ship designation in the game code is “TYPE-9_MILITARY/FORC_FDEV_V_MAMMOTH”

The internals are as follows: -

• Class 8 Power plant (Class 6 on the Type 9)
• Class 7 Thrusters (same as Type 9)
• Class 7 Frame Shift Drive (Class 6 on Type 9)
• Class 5 Life Support (same as Type 9)
• Class 6 Power Distributor (same as Type 9)
• Class 4 Sensors (same as Type 9)
• Class 6 Fuel tank (same as Type 9)

UPDATED thanks to Reddit for spotting my error - I had compared to Type-7 (I think) - I plead old age!

The Class 8 power plant puts the T10 right up there with the Cutter, Corvette and Anaconda. The Class 6 power distributor, same as the Type-9, seems a little low, but this ship doesn’t have any Huge hard-points, so maybe a Class 7 wasn’t required - either that or they are trying to limit the ship to kinetic weapons only which draw less power. The Class 7 FSD is a winner for sure, as only the Cutter and Beluga (the two largest ships in the game) have this size of Frame Shift and this vessel is smaller than a Type 9! That means this ship might have a reasonable jump range – especially for a combat class vessel that may have to ship out to Merope.

Nine Hardpoints

4 x Class 3 “Large”
3 x Class 2 “Medium”
2 x Class 1 “Small”

8 Utility slots (twice as many as the Type 9)

That gives this ship a firepower factor of 18 20 (Sum of Class x Qty) which makes it equal to an Imperial Cutter the ship with the most firepower in the game. Interestingly, all the AX weapons released so far are all Class 2, which means the Type-10 is not built as a weapons platform for those AX Multicannons and Missiles released already. Does this mean the ship will be putting Class 2 guns in Class 3 hard-points, or is there a bigger Class of AX weapons to come?

The hard-point names also indicate their position on the ship.

The two small hard-points are located front-left and front-right. Two of the medium hard-points are on the top-left and top-right of the ship. There are two large hard-points top-left and top-right and two large hard-points bottom-left and bottom-right. The final medium hard-point is mid-ship, but it's unclear if it is located top or bottom of the ship.

Layout of optional internals

1. Class 8
2. Class 7
3. Class 6
4. Class 5
5. Class 4
6. Class 4
7. Class 3
8. Class 3
9. Class 2
10. Military slot
11. Military slot

This gives us Class 8 shields in battle or 532T of cargo (256 + 128 + 64 + 32 + 16  + 16 + 8 + 8 + 4) which is unchanged from the Type-9 Heavy.

What else?

According to our anonymous source, the ship lists 53 different paint jobs. That's a lot of new looks to try out! Probably not all on sale on day one though.

The Type-10 has a Ship Launched Fighter Bay and crew positions for a pilot, as well as a second and third seat; meaning it's also a multi-crew ship.

Conclusion

This ship will be (as it's name suggests) a Mammoth! With the better thrusters and top-of-the-line FSD drive, it will be more than adequate to handle (although I doubt any will describe it as agile) and will have the jump range needed to get itself to the Thargoid war zones. With Imperial Cutter level firepower and a lower price-point this will be a popular ship. Being somewhere between the Anaconda (146M CR) and the Type 9 (76M CR) in price, I would speculate the cost of the new ship to be a little over 100M CR.
Sadly the Class 6 power distributor is a bit of an Achilles heel; all that Class 8 power and no way to pipe it out! The Class 7 Thrusters mean this ship is going to be a whale to handle. While slightly smaller than the Type-9, it will be heavier with armour, so don't expect to run rings around anyone.
This looks to be a slow-moving multi-cannon gun platform.

Having been working on Aegis CGs for weeks, I felt like a break. It's all very well humping AEGIS' leg for new toy guns, but there's more to Elite: Dangerous than shooting stuff and I wanted to see some of the new content of 2.4.

Blistering barnacles

First I went seeking one of the recently discovered barnacle forests. The original forest was located on the C2 Moon of the Hyades Sector AQ-Y D81 system, so I prepped my Asp Explorer and set off to see vistas new.

The forest is located in a valley on the moon's surface at LAT 8.89 LONG -153.8 and as you approach all you see is a area filled with a green mist.

I landed at the outer edge of the formation. There is one slightly more prominent barnacle at the centre of the forest and then others arranged in a fractal-like geometric web out from the middle.

I deployed my neon-green SRV and drove into the field. The green mist was less visible at ground level, but the usual whale-song noises we have come to experience at the barnacle sites were also accompanied by something more menacing and quite creepy.

As I moved around the barnacles and scanned structures and scavengers (yes these strange insect-like droids are found here) there were also noises coming from underground. The sounds gave the distinct impression that a LOT more was going on down below out of sight and I was looking at the tip of the iceberg.
Is the forest a bio-organic shipyard? You have to wonder. Either way the noises reminded me of the film "Tremors"; something was definitely moving around underground.

I harvested some materials from shooting a couple of Scavengers and some meta alloy from a few of the "ripe" outer barnacles. Then I packed up my SRV and left the planet. Way too creepy to stay!

Only humans can make a tourist site out of an accident

Next stop on my "tour" was the crashed Thargoid scout ship. I needed LOADS of screen shots to get what I needed for drawing the blueprint, so a visit was a must.

I plotted the route to HIP 17125 and this time took my Anaconda to LAT -65.8 LONG 48.8 on the A 3 A moon. The crash site is visible from quite a long way up in orbital cruise, so it wasn't too hard to find.
I had brought the Anaconda so I could scout ahead with the SLF, so I launched in a F63 Condor to survey the crash site from the air.

Once my Anaconda had caught up, I docked the SLF and landed, then deployed my SRV.

The crash site is basically a giant skid-mark ending in a pile of rocks with a flying saucer sticking out!

There are no scavengers at the site - everything is dead. I looked around and drove some way from the site looking for additional debris or signs of what might have brought the Thargoid ship down, but there is nothing else to see.
You can scan the wreck, but this is a bit of challenge as the SRV will only perform a scan when you are close to the top of the Thargoid and that requires some acrobatics in your SRV to accomplish!

One thing to look at is the top of the ship. I've not shown it here, because [SPOILERS]. Go and see it for yourself.

Space 3303: Moonbase INRA

My next stop was the most recently discovered 8th INRA (Intergalactic Navy Research Arm) base. Being military (and possibly a Thargoid target) I took my Corvette this time.

I landed at the base accompanied by Sir Clip in his Asp. The base is abandoned. A haunted house in space.

The two silos that once contained the Navy's bio-weapon that defeated the Thargoids (or so we thought) stand like dark monuments.



The base itself though, is not entirely dead. There are four data-points around the base, which when scanned, reveal audio logs which tell of the fate of those who manned the station. The only shame is that these logs are not dated, so we don't have any context of when these events occurred.

As I flew away from the site I couldn't help, but wonder why there were not signs of what took place. No wreckage human or Thargoid is there and nor are there any signs of weapons installations. The whole experience raised more questions than it answered.

What this visit has done is make me want to visit the other seven bases and try to put more of the picture together. Rumour has it that there are twelve bases in all, so we have yet to find the other four.

After publishing vectors of the ships and vehicles from Elite: Dangerous that I had compiled while drawing my ship blueprints over the last year or so, I had a lot of interest from other members of the community who wanted to use them in their own projects.

As long as my blog gets a mention (somewhere) and nobody tries to take credit for the work I've done, I'm very happy for anyone to do this and actively encourage such creativity. 

With this in mind, a CMDR had emailed me asking for vectors - this time of the isometric projections which were not included in the vectors I published previously. So, to address this I've created 256px x 256px icons for every vehicle in the game in PNG and SVG (vecor) formats. These are available to download in a single ZIP file here.

And they look like this..

I have updated the set of Thargoid data obtained (can't say how) from the Federal Navy.

Thargoid Sensor

Previously the Unknown Artefact.

Thargoid Scout

The scout ship seen only at a crash site so far.

Thargoid Interceptor

The Cyclops variant Thargoid ship.

Comparative scale

To see the Thargoid vessels compared with the human vessels. (4K+ image)

Ship skins

At the Frontier Expo on Saturday October 8th I got to chat with Sandro Sammarco, Frontier's Lead Designer, about paint jobs.

Following my article last week, the FD Power Survey, I thought I would go to the source and ask Frontier how they decide which ships get paint jobs and ship kits, and what - if any - criteria was used to make this decision.

Sandro is a very approachable person and offered to talk to me any time I wanted during the Expo. So, between presentations I put on my "Journalist" hat (or Elite: Dangerous cap at least) and asked the question.

"How do you decide which ships get paints in the store?"

Sandro-
The paint jobs, ship kits and other DLC are all managed by the marketing department. The development team are not directly involved in the selection process.

"From the numbers I've gathered from Inara, the most popular ships are the Asp Explorer and Anaconda, but the store mostly has Viper and Cobra paints; do marketing not look at ownership stats?"

Sandro-
Marketing choose what skins they want to sell based on their own research of player purchases, but they do approach the developers for numbers of ships owned.

So that answered my question.

Sandro had a bit of chat with me; he's a very amiable and we spoke about ship roles and where different ships fit in, with the popularity of the Anaconda.

Sandro-
The Anaconda is a bit of an overpowered ship, but we can't change it now, as it is very popular. Players wouldn't like us changing their favourite ship.

Our conversation tool place before the presentation, so he couldn't say anything without spoilers, but he did say there were ships coming to the game that would make some exciting changes.
Looking at the Krait, Type-10 and Chieftain, I can see what he means, as these are the first wave of a number of ships to come in 2.4 and Beyond.

Thargoids

On an unrelated topic, I drew a new blueprint on Friday of a Thargoid Interceptor; leaked from an undisclosed source in the Federation here is the Cyclops!

On Saturday the first Frontier Expo took place. It was held at “Here East” in the Olympic Park in north London near to Stratford. The expo showcased Frontier’s past games, many of which I personally was unaware of, and featured heavily the existing games of Planet Coaster and Elite: Dangerous, as well as promoting Frontier’s new IP which is the Jurassic Park Evolution game, scheduled for release next summer; probably to coincide with the release of the next feature film.

When I arrived at the venue there was a queue outside arranged around the large Cobra scale model we’ve see before at the launch party. There was also a Jurassic Park explorer on display and the Chief Beef character from Planet Coaster was “working the crowd”.

Once inside after a security check, we took a lift upstairs and were greeted with a “goody bag”. The more expensive Founders tickets got a bright orange gloss-card bag, while the rest of us got fabric bags (I think the Founders dibbed out there). The bag I received contained a cool galaxy map mouse-mat, a Planet Coaster water bottle, digital game codes for Planet Coaster and Elite: Dangerous DLC, a T-shirt, some artwork postcards for both games and a really amazing large card print of a scene from Jurassic Park Evolution.

The Expo was held in two halls, with a third side hall devoted to 3rd parties and refreshments. These included Lave Radio, Hutton Orbital Radio, the Special Effects charity and Spidermind Games. There were also a number of well know Streamers in the streaming room and I think I might have spotted a few Hutton Truckers.

The main hall and secondary hall both hosted presentations throughout the day, I will included URLs to these streams as soon as they are available, so you can watch them – take the time, as they are all very interesting. Also in the main hall there was a diorama of dinosaurs as a backdrop to Jurassic Park Evolution trailer running and the two Frontier exhibition stands - one with the console version of Elite on it and the other with the PC version of Elite.

There was a section of PCs all devoted to playing Planet Coaster and attendees could all sit down at these workstations and play the game. There unfortunately wasn't a playable copy of Jurassic Park Evolution at the expo... early days!

While the events of the day were interesting and it was certainly great to catch up with those commanders who I haven’t seen, some since the premier event in 2014 and others who I have never met before, like the contingent of French and German commanders who helped with the translation of my blueprints (great to see you guys!). The Elite community is a fantastic bunch of people and I could probably fill my blog with a long shout-out to all the people that I met there just on Saturday.

The Juicy Bit

Thing that most people will be interested in was the talk given at 5pm when Frontier announced what they will be doing for the coming year for Planet Coaster, the launch of Jurassic Park Evolution and the big “and finally” which was what’s next Elite: Dangerous, which they have subtitled “2.4 And Beyond”!

What was made very clear, was that the coming year’s releases will be free to anyone that has already bought Horizons, so that means the coming years-worth of DLC is basically inclusive!
Starting with a , which included the Thargoid scan making a green laser sweep over the audience (very cool Frontier), the presentation got off to a great start.

The first feature announced for Elite was wing missions, which is something that the community, my own gaming group of Dead Men Walking included, really wanted to have so that our group complete missions together.

Frontier also stated that better trade data would be available in game.
They announced that one of the changes they are making to the gaming engine was , which in simple terms means more variety on planet surfaces, with better textures and better landscapes. A greater variety were demonstrated by showing some slides of different types of planet which looked very impressive in the flesh.

Then they teased some new weapons. No details were given, so feel free to speculate!

Frontier announced new narratives for the game meaning new story lines to take players in different directions; They also plan to continue the Guardians storyline and the new narratives to come will have a lot of crossover with this and the ongoing Thargoid narrative.
A behind the scenes video (which I haven’t yet seen published online) gave us a peek at the Frontier offices and the design of new ships and weapons that will be coming to the game, all of which looked very interesting.
Frontier then stated that the game will be receiving “a lot of new ships”, some of which they showed us -  some of which we caught a glance of (in the previously mentioned video) all of which were completely new ships. See left-hand screen below; what ship is THAT? (Krait on right).

Now my prediction that the Type-10 Defender would be a variant of the Type-9 proved to be correct. Shown in the teaser video from several different angles, you could see that the Type-10 is a militarised Type-9, which clearly has a lot more engine power!

Credit to @EliteCast for the excellent Type-10/Type 9 comparative screenshot.

They’ve also narrowed the hull with flight-deployed winglets. The vessel shown appeared to have a ship kit fitted (spoilers!!!).

The first of the two new ships that were shown to us was the “Chieftain”, which is a Lakon Spaceways designed ship produced for the Alliance, which makes it the first alliance vessel in the game, which has a passing resemblance to the Pelican dropship from HALO. We were shown a of the ship as it will appear in game, and while there’s been some speculation as to the size of the vessel, we were given no statistics of either vessel, so it will be quite difficult know for certain this size of these ships (other than the Type 10).

The second ship shown was in its early design stages and they only had an , however the ship will be very popular with fans of the 1984 Elite, as it is a legendary fighter from the original game the “Krait”.

Speculation Alert!

The Krait

Using captures from the videos, I have been able to speculate the approximate size class of the two new ships. Please bear in mind this is not much more than an educated guess, so don't go buying curtains based on my measurements, okay?

The sneek peek video shows a Cobra next to the Krait, so scaling the image after a bit of perspective correction, the Krait would be 42m x 51m (height unknown) making it similar in size to an Asp Scout.

One thing very noticeable on the animated render, is that the Krait has two crew positions either side of the main cockpit and clearly shows a fighter bay behind the cargo hatch, making it both an SLF capable ship and a multi-crew ship!

UPDATE: Using perspective editing I took some (rough) measurements from the video render to compare with the earlier top-down screen grab and found the Krait *might* be larger and squarer than I first estimated. Based on a 18m launch bay and 5m cargo hatch, the ship is 62m long and 62m wide.

That would make the Krait between the Asp Explorer and Fer De Lance in size, so the cost could be anywhere between 6-50M CR! We won't know, until we have more about the ships core internals. One thing from the render is the clearly visible Class 3 hardpoints on the front underside. However, there are no other visible hard-points top or bottom, so would this make the Krait a Vulture XL? The lack of weaponry would have to be balanced with something (more than a fighter bay) so is the Krait super-fast and agile? We'll find out. 

The Chieftain

The Chieftain is a Lakon ship, which kindly have the same cockpit configuration, so based on that, the ship is quite a big one!

Comparing with a Type-9, you can see that while a little narrower, the Chieftain is a good 10m longer. That makes this ship in the same size class as an Anaconda.

After getting hold of some better quality bitmaps, I redid this based on the size of the cargo hatch (which is universal) and the ships comes out much smaller, a little larger than a Federal Gunship. But it does appear to have six Class 2 hard-points and two Class 3 hard-points.

Based on my revised size estimates and what can be deduced from the pictures shown, we have two medium sized combat vessels. One aparently armed to the teeth, but with no fighter bay and the other with minor armaments and a fighter bay and some possible X factor we don't know about yet.

Frontier announced that they would be bringing to the game. This means no more text-walls for galactic news. Instead each article can be played as an audio track, from the looks of it while flying the ship (i.e. out of menu).

Another big game changing and exciting announcement made was that of Squadrons. Squadrons will be in-game player groups with in-game membership, and admin tools. The squadrons will be able to purchase in game Capital ships for their group, designated as a “Carriers” which will be exclusive to the members of the squadron. I would imagine (purely speculating) these would be a specific class of megaship with large, small and medium landing pads on board. Either way this is something that gaming groups (my own included) have been crying out for.

As promised 2.4 is going to see some major revamps to existing game mechanics and core gameplay one of those being a revamp of mining, offering new mining tools for both extraction and detection of minerals and metals and the ability to carry out operations like asteroid blasting and deep mining.
Frontier showed us a concept art (which I think I’ve seen before) of a snowy planet surface, they have said is that they are working on a new lighting model and new planet surface types with localised ambient effects, like fog. The concept art was set as a target for the developers to match for the in-game graphics.

Exploration is going to be getting a major revision, with more tools for exploration - many new items are out in deep space, outside the bubble, that have yet to be discovered and Frontier are also adding a Codex for explorers to log their discoveries. Frontier described the exploration changes as having “new anomalies and content to discover out in the black”.

Lastly part of the 2.4 teaser video showed off a new class of Thargoid ship – the red Thargoid!

I’ve not covered any of the Planet Coaster or Jurassic Park Evolution as these are not Elite-related, but both presentations were amazing and while I already own Planet Coaster, Jurassic Park Evolution is now on my “Must have” list.

Last May I published an article on what ships players owned. I got my data from the Inara website because while it couldn’t cover everyone, it has large enough numbers to be representative.

Last year the most popular ship in terms of ownership numbers and as a first-choice primary vessel was the Asp Explorer.

Have the 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 updates and the addition of two new passenger vessels changed that?

Short answer is “yes”. The Asp Explorer while still the most popular ship to own, has fallen 0.66% from 12.92% to 12.26% and has been supplanted as the most popular primary vessel by the Anaconda. This would appear to show that the player-base has become more affluent over the last year and a half.

Here is the division of ship ownership as 2.4 has launched.

The least popular ship last year was the Orca, but following the addition of passenger missions in the game, that has changed. Now the least popular ship is the Asp Scout, meaning Asps occupy top and bottom place! The Orca is now more popular than the Asp Scout, Federal Dropship and Federal Gunship. The most popular passenger vessel is the recently added Dolphin. This would appear to show most players are only putting a toe in the passenger mission waters.

Clearly the addition of content has shifted the dynamic.

Thargoids might shift them again. With the requirement for four Class 2 hard-points for AX Missiles and space required for “standard” weaponry as well, will the changes brought by 2.4 cause a resurgence in the popularity of the Federal Dropship? We shall see. Let’s face it, nobody is going to make war on the Thargoids in a Beluga Liner!

Top of the Pops

Well, ship-pickers, who are the winners and losers in our chart? Where have the biggest gains and losses been seen?

The top 5 winners are the Anaconda, who has jumped a whopping 2.21%. The Dolphin which has gone from nowhere to 1.29%, making it more popular than the Type-9 was last year. The Imperial Cutter has gone up 1.11% to 3.10% showing the player-base are getting rank as well as credits in game. Then the Beluga line takes the number four spot from nowhere with 1.08% and finally at number five, the Federal Corvette with 3.10% rising 0.80% from last year.

Last year the most popular ships were the Sidewinder, Anaconda, Python and Cobra Mk 3 – all multi-role – with the two exceptions of the Vulture (a pure combat vessel) and the Asp Explorer which is primarily an explorer.

This year we’re seeing that the Fer-de-Lance has crept up to push the Sidewinder out of that group, indicating that the player-base is not only wealthier, but more inclined toward combat.

Who are the biggest losers?

The poor Vulture, despite hanging on in the top five most popular ships, lost the most players with a 2.12% loss. Have players moved to the FDL to avoid the Vulture’s weak cockpit? Or did they just get rich enough to buy the combat ship they wanted all along?

At number two on the “loser list” is the Cobra Mk III! Yep, the iconic ship is falling out of fashion. It lost 1.75% of the player-base in the last 18 months.

The third ship we’re learning not to love is the Imperial Clipper, with ownership falling by 1.24%. That means more people have ditched their Clippers than the total number of players who own Keelbacks!

Our fourth biggest looser is the Federal Assault Ship. This craft has lost 1.20% of the player-base. Why? This ship was popular as a combat vessel with PvP and PvE alike, but it looks like those players are moving on to vessels new.

The fifth biggest loser was the Diamondback Scout dropping 0.84% from 2.32% to only 1.48%. Why? As a small combat ship, it just doesn’t seem to compete with the cheaper Cobra and Vipers.

Some worthy changes to note. The Orca, Keelback and Gunship have all doubled in popularity. The Keelback has clearly benefitted from being the smallest vessel to have Ship Launched Fighters. The Orca has seen a surge due to passenger missions. Why has the Gunship gained? I can only speculate that it’s combat role is raising its profile.

Have ship paint jobs kept up with what's popular in-game? Last year there was a disconnect between what was owned and what paints you could buy in the store.

The short answer here is "no". There are disproportionate amounts of paints available for the Eagle and Viper, while the popular Asp Explorer has far fewer paints, especially considering it's the number one ship in the game for the last two years! Now, as I said at the start, Inara numbers are only representative of a selected portion of the player base - all be it as big portion. Does Frontier check their own numbers before prioritising paints for one ship over another? I'd hope so, but the current numbers don't seem to bear that out.

Better luck next year!