Patch Notes

A real flight model — your ship, your hands

• M on the bridge now takes everything manual. One keypress moves the helm and fire control to your hands; press it again and the autopilot takes back the con. In manual, target locks are for your targeting computer only — cycle hostiles with T/Y all you like, the ship keeps flying wherever you point it.
• A throttle. ↑/↓ runs your engines from all-stop to flank speed. Connect to a parked ship and it is genuinely parked — no phantom drift, a still debris field, engines at idle. Open the throttle and the hum spools up with it.
• A stick. W/S pitch, A/D roll, Q/E turn — with real inertia: rates ramp while held and coast when released, like something with mass. Full six degrees of freedom: pitch through the vertical, fly a loop, fly inverted. Space has no up.
• Your flying is real. Throttle and heading write genuine movement orders — every other captain watching the system sees your ship fly what you fly. Lock a target in auto mode and the chase is real too.
• Honest instruments. Identical hulls now read identical speeds (the old readout was, frankly, making numbers up), a locked target's SPD comes from its actual course, and distances across the solar view now read in light-seconds — kilometres never made sense out here.
• The trigger always answers. Space with no firing solution still sends a volley down the boresight — and spends the round. Guns cost charge whatever you point them at.
• H hides the entire HUD for a clean glass cockpit. Press it again to bring the panels back.

Every race shoots in its own colours

• The default hull weapon is now a machine-gun tracer burst — twenty to thirty fast bolts with a tight spread, replacing the old single red flash. The colour follows the hull that fires it: Humans and the Vatari Cult burn red, Knossons green, Feon-Tar purple, Sharne orange, Derulons yellow. A captured hull keeps its maker's guns.
• Equipped lasers still fire their item colour as beams, and defence platforms still fire cyan — so at a glance you can read who is shooting, with what, from where.

Weapon range — positioning starts to matter

• Every armed hull now has a Weapon Range (600 light-seconds across the board for now — per-gun ranges are coming), shown on the unit's stats.
• Fight inside your range and you fire half again as often. A ship with a known position, with a known hostile inside its gun range, gets a 1.5× initiative bonus every combat round. Range is a benefit, never a blocker: ships without positions fight exactly as before.
• Move orders pin down the whole battlefield. The first tactical order in a system gives every ship there a real, shared position — from that moment, every observer sees the same fleet layout.
• See your reach. The new Gun Range toggle draws a hairline red circle at each selected ship's range.

Fleet tools on the left rail

• Select your ships and a toolbar docks above the solar controls: the Gun Range toggle, and a Formations button that fans out five orders — V, both diagonals, a sphere, and a three-line convoy — oriented to the way you're looking, tight enough to fly as one wing. One click, one order, the fleet forms up.

A camera that goes where you look

• Free pan at last. Middle-drag or arrow keys slide the view across the system; the mouse wheel now zooms toward your cursor, so aim-and-zoom takes you anywhere without touching a pan key.
• F flies, nothing snaps. Focusing your fleet is a smooth 600 ms glide that keeps your viewing angle; clicking a planet or the sun flies you there (the little info card that used to pop up is gone — it earned nothing).
• Panning lets go. Focused on a planet and want out? Just pan — the camera detaches instead of snapping back like it was glued.
• Drags can't be stolen any more. Selection boxes that died halfway, rotations that suddenly “clicked” the sun and dived into it, gestures interrupted the moment a notification appeared — all one family of input bugs, all fixed. Your drag finishes where you release it, every time.

Missions, on the map

• Systems with open contracts now wear a mission badge on the galaxy map — the giver's initials in their colour (or a count when several givers post there), visible from mid-zoom. Click it and the Mission Board opens already filtered to that system, with a chip to widen back out. No more cross-referencing the whole board against the map.

Under the hood

• The galaxy map's data engine was rewritten. Identical information, computed ~24× faster server-side, fetched on smarter schedules — the multi-second stalls on big galaxies are gone, and your browser stops re-downloading a megabyte of unchanged map every few seconds.
• Firefox commanders get their frame rate back — nebulas on the galaxy map are now painted once and reused, instead of being redrawn from scratch sixty times a second.
• Docking looks like docking. Ships now zip into their carrier when they dock and emerge from it when they launch — no more materialising from hyperspace at the system's edge.
• Arriving fleets scatter naturally — a hashing quirk could arrange a newly pinned fleet into a suspiciously perfect five-armed spiral. The galaxy is not sending you ninja stars; it never was.
• The bridge faces the way you're flying. Connecting to a moving ship now points you down its actual course instead of a direction it abandoned minutes ago.
• The solar view's left rail was regrouped — camera, then intel, then modes, exit at the bottom — and the galaxy-wide system search no longer pretends to work inside a solar system.