The new ship will be called the Vulture.
The ship is shown next to it's stable-mate the Eagle, bottom left.
As you can see, it's larger than the Cobra Mk III and is classed as "a heavy fighter" armed on a par with a Python or Clipper.
"Vulture"
As the bird name suggests it's probably a Core Dynamics ship, like the Eagle.
Mike Evans (Frontier Developer) mentioned that the Vulture would be THE heavy fighter ship (very good at flying and fighting, pretty much bad at anything else).
Specification confirmed by Mike Evans that has dribbled out via forum comments:-
- 2 x Large Weapon Hardpoints
- 4 x Util slots
- Class 4 Power Plant
- Class 5 FSD Drive
- Class 3 Life Support
- Class 5 Power Distributor
- Class 4 Sensors
- Class 3 Fuel Tank
- 2 x Class 1 slot (empty by default)
- 1 x Class 2 slot (empty by default)
- 1 x Class 4 (Class 3 Cargo Rack by default)
- 1 x Class 5 (Shield Generator by default)
In terms of speed, acceleration & manoeuvrability it will be similar to an Eagle, not as fast but more consistent across pip levels.
News of 1.1 here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=103141
A quick Summary
- Planet rendering improved - layers for depth (cloud, lights at night, land masses) the layers actually speed up rendering.
- Community goal missions - supply food and collect bounty to restore order to a system in anarchy.
- Decals for Pilots Federation ranks – these will be available as you attain ranks.
- As part of this change support for the Founders level decal - The Founders decal hasn't been released yet but will be the Pilots Federation logo.
- Kickstarter decal for the £5 reward tier or above is a ringed planet.
- The "Day 1" decal may in fact be the Skull "Mercenary Decal".
- Disappearing holograms on landing pads fixed.
- API Support for 3rd party applications.
- Stories and events supplied to FD will be included in Galnet.
As you may or may not know, there are different language sections of the forums on Frontier's website.
The French contingent has decided to claim LAVE for themselves and make it French territorial space.
It was bound to happen.
See this forum thread for details: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=102626
In other news, Frontier's sales figures show they've sold 300,000+ copies of Elite since launch. While that doesn't sound like COD numbers, that's the same number of users Eve took six years to acquire, or one third of the total "Alien: Isolation" sales (1M) across four platforms in four months. Not too shabby.
Hello Commander,
We believe your account has taken advantage of exploits in the game and as such we have removed credits (and assets where appropriate) from your Commander.
If you believe this to be in error, please create a ticket at; https://support.elitedangerous.com under the category of “Exploit” (please do not reply to this email) – we will then investigate further into your account.
Kind Regards
The Frontier Team
Logged in just now and I still have my HARD EARNED cash and ship, having never seen an exploit, much less used one!
I then have to ask myself, what on Earth are Frontier doing? Was this sent instead of the Newsletter by mistake? Did they drink too much over Christmas?