0.596.5 - Cloaking Devices

Cloaking Devices Debunked
Reports of cloaking device being used by entities operating within rings were debunked earlier today, as an independent investigation held by miners guild concluded. After carefully examining the ship logs data across multiple ships, investigators found that the reports of stations “appearings in the thin air” can be mainly attributed to user errors. While the intoxication of the crew was raised as a likely reason, no biometric logs could be used to prove or disprove it, and this thread of investigation was abandoned.

Wave Patterns in the Rings
Meta-analysis of multiple telescopic images cross-referenced with a vast array of LIDAR data submitted by individual spaceship captains allowed researchers to form new hypotheses on the formation of macroscopic wave patterns within the rings. A well-known phenomenon where the average density of particles within the rings visible on the macroscopic scale tends to form waves of high and low-density areas was previously attributed to gravitational effects. Still, most recent discoveries suggest that electrostatic forces present within the ring plane could significantly impact the phenomenon.

Lidar ranges Extended by Software Update
Runasimi Inc, the leading supplier of white-label LIDAR signal processing hardware, released a new software update package for their R68050 phase-processing chip. Further increased base frequency and improved noise filters promise to improve the LIDAR detection range even on existing hardware and are reported to raise the device's effective range by over 300%.

Maintenance Logs
- Adjusted the ice generation and exploitation routines. An emergent interaction between the spawning routines and the exploitation grid shape caused wave formations to appear inside rings. While this emergence was welcome and confirmed by most recent discoveries about the density patterns inside rings, the emerged features were bigger than expected. To counteract this, the exploitation map resolution is now 300% bigger, reducing wave formations' size by 300%. As a side-effect, your save file can take up to 270kB more disk space.
- Anomalies will not spawn within your visual range anymore. While more minor anomalies were not noticeable, an occasional asteroid-based station decloaking a few hundred meters from your ship could be jarring.
- Increased the range of your LIDAR - it will now be able to detect ice and anomalies further away from your ship.
- Lidar display on your OMS menu in the Pilot and Geologist tab will now present high-albedo (shiny) objects in the same pulsating manner as your main HUD LIDAR.
- Changed the scaling function for your OMS LIDAR displays to ensure that they will show the same range, even if you use non-standard resolution or increase the HUD size.
- Adjusted the synthetic siren of AT-K225.
- Points of interest exposed by your crew could contain the same event that was already discovered, which in some situations would look like stations you already know about moved through the rings faster than your ship.

0.602.5 - Space Construction

OCP-209 available on the second-hand market
Obonto Microengineering has announced that it is decommissioning the 209 model of their Orbital Construction Platform, and they are now available on the second-hand market. Designed for habitat construction, the OCP-209 features a massive side-loading cargo bay, twin heavy mountings, and a comfortable habitat with the ability to provide rotational G, making her suitable for extended construction or resupply missions.

Obonto Microengineering is offering these decommissioned ships at an attractive price, so don't miss out on this chance to get your hands on some of the best construction craft in the solar system.

Physical displays make a comeback
While virtual displays may dominate space exploration, one company is bringing back physical screens with the release of its OCP-209 HUD. Obonto Microengineering offers a physical display that is both reliable and robust. The physical hardware offers more protection than a virtual display can offer, while the transparent panes offer more visibility.

SAN-BUS recall
Many computer systems sold for commercial mining craft have been recalled due to an error that caused erratic release of system locks for some equipment. The upgraded SAN-BUS components will improve consistency and predictability with equipment such as point defenses, drones, and manipulators. Captains can upgrade or replace their systems by contacting your local dealership.

Maintenance Logs
- New ship: Obonto Construction Platform 209.
- New HUD: OCP-209.
- Cargo Containers and similar equipment will not boot up and use their thrusters when your ship travels back to Enceladus Prime station.
- HUDs using physical displays are now more resilient to electromagnetic damage.
- Returning to the Enceladus Prime station will no longer cause your ship to burn a massive hole in the rings at the location you left.
- Relative skill stats on the Crew Hire menu will immediately update when you hire someone.
- Improved performance when swapping equipment on your ship on the Enceladus Prime station.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the game to crash when tuning nanodrone systems to specific values.
- The remote microseismic scanner display will now be only shown on the equipment simulations related to it.
- Certain systems, like the Point Defence Turrets or Nanodrone systems, would keep their lock on an object indefinitely if you turned them off when they acquired a target, causing other systems (including the AR1500 Salvage Manipulator) to ignore that target.
- When playing on the peaceful difficulty, it was still possible to encounter a pirate trap by following a quest.
- Increased the speed threshold on which the Daredevil mood triggers with its accompanying soundtrack.
- On some ship configurations, the geologist panel controls would not show up.
- Fixed typos in ship names. The fix will affect only newly encountered ships.
- Mineral Market will not close itself automatically on the Steam Deck anymore.
- Fixed a race condition that could crash the game when a ship equipped with a physical display de-spawned, such as when changing from the Enceladus station to the Rings and back, or purchasing new equipment.
- Updated translations.

0.603.6 - Tactical Retreat

- Tapping "disengage autopilot lock" (G by default) when no target is selected will disable your autopilot.
- Tapping "engage the target in front" (F by default) will engage the autopilot immediately, even if there is no target in front of your ship.
- EIAA-1337 and NPC now understand that if an ore chunk is touching their excavator and moving with a very similar velocity to your ship, the thing to do is open the excavator and speed up. This prevents NPC and EIAA-1337-equipped ships from pushing the ore around with closed excavators.
- Computer kinetic damage (faulty sensors) resistance depended on the time scale. While not apparent during normal gameplay, kinetic impacts during extreme slowdowns, such as with the OMS screen open, could cause up to 10x more damage than they should. In some edge cases, this could cause your computer rapidly receive damage as soon as you open up the OMS menu.
- Reworked the way your Astrogator interacts with your LIDAR display. Instead of highlighting nearby contacts in their Tactical Awareness range, your Astrogator will now expose the Tactical Markers they put on ships on your LIDAR. Tactical Markers need to be entered into your on-board computer by your Astrogator and will appear only within their Tactical Awareness range - they, however, do rely on tightbeam radar rather than LIDAR, so they are not obfuscated by loss of line of sight, are not affected by the LIDAR refresh rate and will present a location of a ship for much longer. The markers will remain on the edge of the screen for ships exiting the displayed range of LIDAR.
- Fixed a rare race condition that could cause the game to crash when you returned to the Enceladus station.
- Ores and asteroids will not disappear from the screen while you still can see them during the return burn to Enceladus.

0.604.0 - Hot Rods

- Improved performance of the tactical LIDAR markers.
- Improved performance of the Tuning menu.
- Fixed a race condition in the Tuning menu which could crash your game if you moved between the tuning menu and other menus quickly enough.
- When tuning autopilot marker opacity, you will now actually see the preview of what you are tuning on the simulation subwindow.
- Keeping a piece of an event, such as flying with a derelict attached to your ship, salvaged cargo container and similar, would prevent other location-based events of the same class from appearing in the game. This led to some unexpected side effects. Moving away from the original event location will prevent that now.
- Parts of the HUD-related tuning options, such as the microseismic scanner focus, were missing from the Tuning menu.
- Fixed lag spikes on the dive summary screen that occurred when you brought in a lot of ore and sold them.
- Tuning options for HUD equipment will now appear in the tuning menu immediately after you purchase such a device.
- Some new ships - K37, Prospectors and EIMEs - came without HUD pre-installed. It got installed automatically for free when you first launched into the rings or opened the tuning menu, but prior to that, the equipment screen would show either void or the HUD system installed on your previous ship.
- Updated translations. We switched to dedicated translation software, which allowed us to catch many tiny (and big) translation errors. There are hundreds of translation fixes across all languages (including English), and more are to come.

0.606.1 - Body Kits

- New tuning option: toggle audio feedback for LIDAR contacts.
- New tuning option: Customize NDCI collision warning.
- New tuning option: toggle autopilot assist for variable geometry crafts.
- Disengaging your autopilot with the G key when you have a moving target selected will now apply the correct velocity to your craft.
- You could click multiple times on the "Launch Dive" button before the launch animation triggered, which incurred multiple launch fees.
- Fixed a race condition that could crash the game whenever a HUD was despawned. This could cause crashes when transitioning between Enceladus and the Rings, adjusting equipment, or tuning options showing your HUD.
- Updated translations.

0.606.8 - Black Holes

- The astrogation transfers within rings between specific locations used to cause a big hole to be burned on the departure spot. It was dependent on both the starting location and your destination.
- Fixed disproportional resource depletion when mining in dense, rich areas. Destroying asteroids created by shattering bigger rocks counted towards depletion of the field, while it should not have. While the effect was mostly negligible in sparse areas, in deep veins and propellers, it could cause more rocks to disappear on subsequent visits than they should.
- The game will now remember all the extra rocks you create when excavating a dense ice field. If you create a cloud of small debris, you will find it when you return to the same spot. This excludes ore chunks, which move fast enough to be lost.
- Re-set the asteroid depletion map to remove holes created by the in-ring transfer bug.
- Reworked the launch dive screen. It now fits better in small resolutions.
- You can now pick a known astrogation location as your dive entry target on the station.
- Videos on the Enceladus billboards load just before they are played and are freed as soon as they are over, working around codec-related issues some players were experiencing.
- Additional in-universe ad.
- Updated translations.

0.607.3 - Rolling Rocks

- Enhanced astrogation: I reworked both the visual effects/camera movement of astrogation and the ice generation during cutscenes. The result is a visible departure/arrival during the astrogation cutscene, and you no longer arrive in a mostly empty area around your destination. Your astrogator should still pick an approach vector that is clear of obstacles.
- When departing through an astrogation jump, under specific circumstances, the game could move all the rocks around the area you were departing from a few kilometres in the opposite direction. This could result in relatively empty patches of space next to dense areas. The effect was most noticeable in extremely dense regions and propeller formations.
- Improved accuracy of depletion tracking for moving asteroids.
- Fixed astrogation selection with gamepad or keyboard alone.
- Easier selection of dive targets on gamepads.
- EIME HUD temperature warning levels are now adjusted to represent dangerous fusion reactor temperatures on Elon Interstellar Model E.
- Cosmetic enhancements to dive target selection screen.
- Updated translations

0.608.1 - Ignition Sequence

- The Z-Axial Pinch fusion torch now has an ignition cooldown. It can only draw enough power to attempt an ignition sequence five times per second. While this makes a worn-out drive behave more erratic, it also severely lowers the power requirements.
- When starting a dive on the first few kilometres into the rings, you could end up with a trajectory outside the ring area, triggering immediate return. This didn't affect neither Hohmann transfers nor deeper dives.
- Picking a target on the Dive Selection screen from your known locations will now always result in the best trajectory you could take towards it. This also prevents the interlunar propellant usage from jumping up or down significantly in subsequent selections of the same target, as rings rotate in relation to Enceladus.
- The inclination of your initial trajectory is now visible on the dive target selection screen.
- Updated translations.

0.608.5 - Velocity Squared

- Improved performance of the Dealer and Fleet screens on Enceladus station.
- Increased accuracy of kinetic impact damage tracking for ships (both yours and NPC).
- Fixed unresolved physics for Runasimi KR37 cargo baffles, which could induce an unexpected torque on your ship, causing it to spin up without visible interactions.
- Fixed some dialogue trees regarding salvage recovery, which could lead to dead ends.
- Changed the dynamic loader to address freezes experienced on some Linux systems.

0.609.2 - Icebreaker

- Mineral processing units capable of processing massive asteroids will now apply damage based on the exposed area of the rock they process. This considerably speeds up the processing speed of Rusatom-Antonoff MPU applied to larger asteroids in your cargo hold - but also increases the power requirements to process.
- Fly-by-wire autopilots will now use another computation method for the desired velocity, ignoring the overshot limits of autopilots. This will increase angular velocity you can apply with a fly-by-wire autopilot, as it is not concerned about being able to stop within 90 degrees if you release the control anymore.
- Added a new crash reporter, which should give me more information to fix any crash-to-desktop problems.
- Fine-tuned jittering settings of the engine. This should result in much smoother gameplay, especially if something unexpected happens that uses a lot of computer resources.
- Fine-tuned memory settings for a smoother background loading experience.
- Videos on the Enceladus billboard now utilize lazy loading, and they should load just before they are displayed. This should fix some video playback problems as well as a race condition experienced on some Linux systems, which caused the game to freeze when you load a save immediately after the main menu is displayed.
- Improved performance of asteroid spawning.
- Anomalies and points of interest will now appear further away from your ship, giving you more time to react and preventing some astrogation accidents - but making them harder to find.
- If your ship suffered kinetic damage during cutscenes, some could carry out and get applied just a few seconds after the cutscene ended.
- Impact with thruster exhaust will not cause the same kinetic damage as being hit by rocks.
- Fine-tune tooltip appearance speed. They will appear sooner now.

0.615.1 - Gravitational Lensing

Drydocks now available for lease
Independently owned ships requiring repairs can now lease the dedicated drydock infrastructure of the Enceladus Prime station, freeing up the docking ring area. The station has a dedicated drydock bay with two large drydocks that can accommodate ships of up to three thousand tons of mass. There is an additional four thousand cubic meters of repair and maintenance space and various specialised tools and equipment to assist with repairs, refits, and upgrades. The lease rates are quite reasonable, and the station staff are happy to help with any necessary paperwork. For more information on drydock leasing services, please contact your local dock manager.

Lawsuits over obfuscated diagnostic protocol
A leading producer of laser mining equipment, Coherent Light, was sued last week over obfuscation of the diagnostic protocols of their hardware. While all their CL-series lasers conformed to regulations requiring mandatory universal diagnostic interface, most lasers' firmware used a proprietary protocol extension, which hid crucial diagnostic information from end-users and independent repair shops. In a motion to settle the dispute, Coherent Light released today the full specification of their protocol extension, third parties to perform allowing detailed hardware diagnostics.

Obonto USV-R recalls
Obonto Microengineering issued a recall of a popular, entry-level reconnaissance craft, USR-V. Their camera lens was prone to excessive wear from micrometeorite impacts. In a surprising move, Obonto is replacing the faulty lens with their brand new series-W product, which is not only said to be much more resistant to impacts but also features an extended field of view. While most independent contractors welcome this development, some tech bloggers claim that this move is a thinly veiled attempt to run extensive field trials of unproven optic technology.

Maintenance Logs
- Changed how repairs and replacement work. Instead of automatically skipping time ahead, any ship you perform maintenance upon will have work performed by the Enceladus repair crew while you can peruse other activities. You can wait for the ship repairs in one of many station’s hotels or take another ship for a dive.
- Replacing your ship's hardware in the Equipment menu, which would result in changing used or damaged items for brand new ones, will now incur identical maintenance downtime for your ship as replacing these items in the Repair menu.
- Time required for ship maintenance is now listed in the Repair menu and on the dock information billboard.
- Maintenance crews fixing your ship are now visible on the Enceladus Prime main menu screen.
- Having damaged weapons or manipulators will no longer stop you from launching from Enceladus.
- When your ship fails pre-flight inspection due to pending maintenance, you will now have the option to book that time at the most affordable capsule hotel on the station from the inspection menu directly.
- Obonto USV-R reconnaissance craft now has a wide-angle lens capable of zooming out 20% further.
- Lasers and microwaves can be damaged and wear out. While all brand-new equipment will perform the same way as it used to, ship captains relying on high-performance hardware tuned to its absolute limit will now experience hardware failures.
- Old used ships can now have damaged or worn weapons installed. This also reduces the purchase price accordingly.
- Re-balanced AR1500 damage and repair cost. It is now cheaper to repair and more resistant to kinetic impacts, but it will wear out quicker and is easier to overheat.
- Ship logs will not show how much time has passed on instant events. They used to show one or two seconds per event, which was confusing.
- The dive target selection screen will always show Hohmann transfer when you enter that menu.
- Expanded description for laser tuning.
- New dialogue options when approaching a derelict ship that is about to be salvaged by a licenced S&R craft.
- All side cradles will behave the same way when being powered down. Left cradles used to fold into another spot than the right ones.
- AR1500 Salvage Manipulator will load up your ship more reliably when it catches an item next to your excavator opening.
- You can now toggle the automatic autopilot configuration when plotting the astrogation course.
- Excavator will not get displaced on ship builds with powerful thrust during hot burns.
- Improved thread safety for the background loader. This makes loading assets faster and prevents crashes experienced on some systems if you try to skip a cutscene that eagerly hides the loading screen.
- Fixed missing fonts on HAL HUD - it will now use the correct font and display information in all the supported languages.
- Fixed scaling of some displays on OCP-209 HUD - they will now show complete information in all supported languages.
- Updated translations.

0.615.2 - Rings of Accretion

- Launching the game on a system with a default language that was already partially translated but not approved for release will no longer result in the game using that partial (unselectable) translation.
- Big Bad Wolf could appear twice on some rare occasions.
- Clicking quickly on the "buy ship" button will no longer allow you to buy two copies of the same ship.
- Updated translations.

0.616.2 - Beyond Horizon

- Fixed wide angle lens on all reconnaissance craft, which ended up being much too wide than designed.
- Pilots of the Tsukuyomi-class frigates are now better at handling their ships, especially during docking manoeuvres.
- Pilots of CERF Search and Rescue ships got extra training on picking up derelict ships and will perform their work better.
- Docking clamps on CERF Search and Rescue ships were welded shut by mistake.

0.617.0 - Linear Acceleration

- Added classic mode.
- Adjusted the hull penetration colliders for K37 and all its variants to prevent ore from being stuck in the rear of the ship and stopping astrogation.
- Improved performance of the Enceladus station screen.
- Fixed slow or stalled Dealer and Fleet menu loading when using a high physics framerate option on a CPU that can't consistently keep that framerate.