0.571.0 - Heavy Duty

New hardware approved for ring use

Previously limited to large-scale asteroid harvesters and military vessels, heavy-duty containers for kinetic ammunition, nanodrone components and enhanced fuel tanks were finally approved for use on selected vehicles. Captains of heavy ships, including the popular Cothon series and Antonoff-Titan K225, welcome the ability to extend their average mission duration. While market analysts warn about a possible spike in consumable prices following increased demand, no such increase was detected at this time.

Tighter exhaust emission limits

Following the discovery of an increased buildup of radioactive exhaust residue on surfaces of stations and habitats in the Saturnian region, Enceladus Corp tightened the emission limits on thermal rockets around inhabited regions. While initial tests indicate that the typical thermal thrusters improve efficiency when operating in propellant-lean mode, engineers are concerned about compromising the longevity of engines.

Macroscopic quantum tunnelling debunked

The famous macroscopic quantum tunnelling experiment allegedly performed at the Pheobe research station was debunked today. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to replicate the experiments by researchers, a new meta-analysis of the data in the paper discovered jitter patterns characteristic of floating point precision errors, which might indicate that the entire paper is based on fabricated data. With the outrage of the scientific community, original researchers requested their paper to be retracted from multi-journal.

Maintenance Logs

• Ships can now have limits on what kind of hardware they can install.
  
• New hardware options for big ships - bigger propellant tanks, more nanodrone and kinetic ammunition storage.
  
• Changed the in-game video codec to an older one, which has a bit bigger download sizes, but uses a lot fewer resources to play, making the playback consistent on all platforms, even when the movie is used during loading and initializing the game. This affects both the intro animation and the in-universe ads displayed on billboards on Enceladus Prime station.
  
• Performance enhancements - collision precision testing is now dynamically adjusted based on the physics tick rate, increasing the precision when it’s most crucial. This will improve CPU performance on mid to high-range hardware, and on low-end hardware, it will prevent cargo from phasing through ship hulls.
  
• Optimized exhaust gas simulation. This will improve performance when multiple thrusters are operating, specifically when there are multiple ships nearby.
  
• The plume detail slider will not only control the display of rocket plumes but now will affect the detail of the exhaust simulation. This will improve performance significantly on low-end machines when you limit the details.
  
• Additional steps for detail sliders in the Settings/Details menu will allow you to fine-tune the performance and appearance of your game to better suit your preferences.
  
• Morale adjustment indicators on Enceladus Prime are now updated each hour instead of once a day. This fixes the indicators not appearing immediately after visits to The Twins.
  
• Fine-tuned AI and detection range for the racing team, so it’s much harder to outrun them to the point where the race is considered cheating. While the racer is still obeying the same physics rules as you, it will be able to fly more recklessly if necessary to keep up.
  
• You can now enable the in-game performance profiling tool using the F11 key.
  
• Internationalization polishing - consistent number formatting. All the numbers are now displayed in locale-specific format, including dynamically generated content.
  
• Updated translations - Spanish translation is now 100% complete.
  
• Updated translations - Hungarian translation is now available, 34% complete.