The Electronic Warfare Update

Hi all! A juicy ship update for you today. We have no less than 4 new ship weapons, 12 modules, and 8 commodities to introduce you to, so straight down to business. Electronic warfare and a revised take on the interdiction system have arrived. With space trucking on the horizon we wanted to make sure there was a dynamic mini-game at play in this department. We also generally wanted to expand the variety of ship archetypes available. Ships should be an expression of your personality, and building a new ship to suit a need should be just as fun for ship building connoisseurs as flying them is for pilots.

But first, some more general tweaks to ships:

- Large weapons will now have a harder time hitting smaller targets.
- Cannons and lasers in particular will suffer additional accuracy penalties when firing at smaller targets if they do not have a target lock. Turrets are exempt.
- Bigger targets can pretty much be always reliably hit by any weapon.
- Missile damage is now partially negated by current speed. Smaller targets get more mitigation from their speed, and bigger targets less.
- Missile ammunition now has 5 charges instead of 10.
- Fixed an issue that let you safely pelt stationary space entities with missiles outside of range.
- Fixed an issue that had missiles hitting new targets when the intended target dies midflight.
- Introducing the simultaneous weapon activation penalty: Firing multiple ship weapons of the same name within a single second will now incur a capacitor cost penalty that increases the more are fired. Different sizes of the same weapon type do not count as "ship weapons of the same name."
- This is sort of provisional as we experiment with ways to mitigate the capacitor efficiency of lots of small weapons on big ships. We want that to be a fitting option (who doesn't like a bunch of guns?), but it proved a bit *too* cap efficient. We'd also like PvP ship engagements to have a bit more breathing space to allow for more decision making. Currently they tend to be over very fast.
- The Damage Boost linked module has changed from +20% damage to +10% damage and additionally imposes a +30% kear cost penalty to the linked weapon.
- From a historical perspective, the Damage Boost module was always a bit of a prototype. Now that shipmodding is here and damage boosts available there, we felt it was time Damage Boost received an identity other than "auto-include." It'll still give you more oomph, but less sustain.

Interdiction

Interdiction has received a rework. Now, every ship starts life with 100% Skipfield Integrity (SI) which can be increased with a new module, Skipfield Boosters.

Interdiction beams now apply a stacking condition on the target which inflicts them with -10% SI. When you attempt a skipdrive trick, the game rolls a chance to fail against your SI. Failing it, all skip tricks go on cooldown. The lower your SI, the greater the possibility of failure and the longer the cooldown becomes. The amount of interdiction power applied by beams can be increased by a new module, Interdiction Amplifiers.

If you really find yourself in a bind, you can trigger your Emergency Skipboosters. This will drain capacitor to remove interdiction effects from your ship all at once. Be careful, though, you could very well end up with no capacitor left...

Enter the big cheese of interdiction: Interdiction Webs. Fired from an Interdiction Web Launcher, these are expensive (read: Good for the Economy) and damn troublesome to get caught in. You can't fire them in close proximity to stations or voidgates. Moving normally into them or having them launched ontop of you reduces your current speed, puts your skip tricks on cooldown, and hits you with a whopping -50% SI.

You can't use skipdrive tricks to fly over webs, attempting to do so will land you straight in the web instead of the intended target. Escape artists might want to consider fitting a Skipdrive Stabilizer to get around this. Or, you can just shoot at the web until it explodes. Webs take 100% damage from all damage types.

That's it for interdiction. Now it's time for...

Electronic Warfare (Ewar)

New weapons:
- Cap Drainer: Steals capacitor charge from target ship. Uses capdrainer coils as ammunition, which have a chance to not be used up.
- Slicekit: Equipped with scripts that install viruses to damage a particular component over time. Uses scripts as ammunition. There's one script commodity for each!
- Signal Jammer: Jam their target lock! Jammed ships cannot target anything except ships jamming them. The better the ship's sensors than the target's, the more likely the jam succeeds.
- These weapons can only be used against other ships, not organics.

New modules:
- Cap Hardener: Provides passive resistance to hostile attempts to drain your capacitor.
- Emergency Cap Charger: Spends capacitor batteries in storage to charge the capacitor. Damages the capacitor in the process, has a long cooldown, and these batteries are damn expensive (read: Good for the Economy)
- ICE Firmware, in six varieties: Engine, Capacitor, Sensors, Shield, Shipsim, and Multisystem. These add ICE to your ship's components to help ward off pesky viruses.

In total we have 8 new commodities: Interdiction Webs, Cap Batteries, Capdrainer Coils, and 5 varieties of Script. A reckoning of autofactories will be coming eventually, but for now all these recipes can be manufactured in Processors Autofactories.

If you've read this now and think "Those sound like irrelevant Space PvP stuffs to me!", don't worry, we'll be teaching NPCs how to use the nastiest of these tools in due course, and then they will indeed be relevant.

Oh, and there are some new shipmod effects to go along with this release. But I'll let you discover them for yourselves.

An update this big is sure to have bugs, so please file your BUG reports when you notice stuff!

Have fun,
Neritus