Something new to fly out and do, a soundtrack you choose yourself, and a long pass over the worlds you fly past.
Missions
- A new contract type: servicing. Until now every job was shoot it, scan it or carry it. This one is hold station and work.
- Servicing call - fly out to a satellite somewhere in the system, hold formation alongside it and work through the list. The bird is still flying when you leave; it turns under its own attitude control and lights up to tell you the job took.
- ISS servicing - a maintenance round on the station itself. It is on your doorstep, so it is rationed: fly other work and the station calls again when it needs you.
- Both are open at CADET, so they are on the board from your first shift.
- A new decoration, Technician, for a hundred completed calls.
The worlds
- Every airless world's relief was re-derived from the measured altimetry. Three separate faults came out of it: rings of false detail around the poles, terrain flattened near the equator, and banding across Oberon, Titania and Triton that came from the seams in the original mosaics.
- Earth's "scar" across the south pole was never a bug - it is Dome A, real Antarctic terrain, amplified until a genuine four-kilometre rise read as a crease. Long and short wavelengths are now scaled separately, so the relief is real at both scales.
- Mercury's surface map is far sharper than it was.
- Saturn's rings no longer get cut off part-way in. Flying in from a distance, a wedge of the ring plane could vanish behind an invisible edge until you got close.
- Satellites no longer shimmer up close - several models shipped with an extra invisible shell drawn over the real hull.
Sound
- A jukebox, on a new AUDIO tab in the flight console. Pick any track and it starts straight away.
- Three play modes: shuffle, play the collection in order, or loop the one you picked.
- The list shows each track's length and full credit, and what is playing now with its position. A fight still takes the music - your choice comes back when it is over.
Flight
- Fixed the left-right controls reversing after a loop. Come out of a vertical loop upright on the compass and steering could be mirrored until you looped again - it was not you.
- The autopilot can be cancelled from every console tab now. On a controller it could not be called off at all from the navigation list, while the HUD went on telling you which button to press.
- Time warp winds down over a couple of seconds instead of stopping dead.
- The floodlights behave like lights: they fall off with distance instead of washing everything to white.
Rescue
- The transport takes longer to reach you and now visibly closes the distance the whole way, instead of appearing to arrive and then hanging there.
- Calling one out for a repair or refuel shows the same countdown an emergency always did - without it there was nothing to say a wait was even in progress.
- The field repair finally makes a sound.
Interface
- Scrollbars follow your ship's colours like the rest of the console.
Several of these came from reports on these forums, and the ones that were hardest to find were the ones described most precisely - the ring that "vanished behind an invisible wall" was exactly that. Keep them coming.