Ships
Outer Ring excavations (ORE) and Deep Core Mining (DCM) have completed a joint venture by creating The Orca. This new empire-capable vessel is designed as a "sub capital" logistical ship with a mining command focus, ideal for the day to day needs of corporations or individuals. Filling a void between regular and capital ships, the Orca is a more affordable option for pilots who can’t yet fly capitals. These boats are able to use stargates but do not have jump drives. CCP Chronotis provides full details in the Orca Dev Blog.
Role Bonus:
250% bonus to range of tractor beams (70km)
100% bonus to tractor beam velocity (1km sec)
500% bonus to survey scanner range (~125km)
Industrial Command Ships Bonus:
3% bonus to effectiveness of mining foreman gang links per level and 5% bonus to cargo capacity per level
Slots: 3/4/2
Turret hard points: 0
Launcher slots: 0
Fitting: 430cpu, 960pg
Drones: 75m3/50 Mbit/sec bandwidth
Need For Speed
Weapon Grouping is a new system that allows you to group your ship’s guns/launchers together into one entity. Group creation will be done through a single right-click menu and activation will be toggled by a shortcut or button. The benefits are that you can fire all guns and missiles in one salvo and change ammo types across all turrets and launchers much more easily. This new feature also reduces the number of database calls required for firing weapons separately, allowing the server to operate more fluidly. Module recharge timers allow players to gauge how long before the next activation. The movable HUD gives players even more control over their UI layout. Full details on Weapon Linking can be found at Weapon Grouping by CCP Ytterbium.
Speed rebalance has been introduced, affecting a great many different ships and modules. Maximum top speed has been reduced across the board along with changes to how micro warp drives operate. Stasis webifiers, rigs, overdrives, implants, web drones and gang bonuses have all been changed. Full details of what has been changed will be listed in the appropriate section and a full listing of the Speed Rebalanced Dev Blog by CCP Nozh is available.
Thousands of NPC's have been affected by changes to rate of fire. Various NPC's with a high rate of fire were modified, their RoF reduced and the damage increased, keeping the DPS the same. Less number of shots means less load on the server.
Various database improvements have been added to allow for optimization of the game engine. These improvements will allow the client to provide a smoother gaming experience for players. This includes changes to Corporation standings which are calculated during downtime.
It also affects how characters are loaded into and unloaded from solar systems.The biggest benefit will be when a large fleet is jumping simultaneously and how the server manages and tracks engagements.
We have made improvements to the contract system on a DB level and we also refactored and optimised how a large number of items are moved between a station hangar and ship cargo hold.
Player Owned Structures, Stations & Outposts
A new Large Ship Assembly Array has been added which can be anchored in high security space. This new assembly array can manufacture battleships, freighters and industrial command ships. It has 3 slots with a 0.75 time multiplier and a 1.0 material multiplier.
