0.186.9 - Shortfall of Gravitas

Today I present you a combined content and bugfix patch. I feel that it's important for Early Access title to address all the known bugs as fast as possible, but I think it's equally important to add some new content, so players who didn't hit the bugs will get something out of it.

Additional upgrades and upgrade changes

A big feature of Shortfall of Gravitas is addition of gimbaled engine mechanics. Thruster gimbals are the real-world technology that allows the rockets to fly - the exhaust can be tilted, providing additional layer of control. This is a multi-stage enhancement: I needed to add a other type of thruster, make sure that autopilot and AI understands that thurster and it's capabilities, and finally - research and develop actual thruster you can buy.

With version 0.186.9 you can equip your ship with Nuclear Assisted Gimbaled Hall Effect Thruster RCS. This is first in the line of vectored thrust that will come in the game. Despite being weaker than most competition and having extraordinary power requirements, NAGHET provides you with ability to vector your exhaust up to 20 degrees, yielding excellent maneuverability (for it's thrust). The downsides are higher price and susceptibility to misalignment.

Gravimetric drone got an overhaul. I made sure that gravimetric drone readouts are accurate and actually readable on all ships. You can now use the drone to guide you to interesting parts of the Rings, as it was supposed to be in the first place.

Bugs fixed

You found many bugs, and I did my best to fix all of them. Here is the list of patches applied:

• Made the visual cues for combat/discovery subtler, so they won't obscure HUD anymore.
• You no-longer can fix the ship up into negative damage, causing unexpected behaviour.
• Fine-tuned thermal damage to thrusters, so well-aimed hit from powerful laser will not send ships spinning so easily.
• Jury-rig mechanics skill was re-balanced. Previously most mechanics you could hire hit the repair cap too soon, making the higher levels of skill useless.
• Fixed appearance of some ships, that were missing vital parts.
• Mouse control of menus could be obscured by invisible objects at Enceladus, making parts of the menus unusable after returning from dive, opening crew menu and similar.
• Fine-tuned font setting for Russian, Korean and Chinese (simplified and traditional) translations, so descriptions at Enceladus don't obscure one-another.
• Removed the lags from settings menu. Have lags for sale now.
• Fixed couple of memory leaks.
• Mining ships again visible on menu screen and credits.
• Fixed a bug in adaptive/military autopilot that caused it to behave worse if it gathered weird data for it's turning feedback loop. As result, said autopilots now fly much smoother.
• Tuned the Eagle Prospector HUD that could flicker if you had big remass tanks and broke your on-board computer just a bit.
• Fixed NPMP engine so it can be replaced now at normal price.
• Fixed a bug that caused guiding drone to work even if it's not mounted on the ship.
• Ships you bought are no-longer visible on the dealer's list.