Space Scanners & Point Defence Turrets

Greetings, Pilots-Engineers!

This is Captain Technician with a new development report. We have prepared the following improvements for the next deployment (this version is currently available on Android; the iOS and Huawei versions will be live in about a day or two):

New Blocks - Space Scanners

• Space Scanner - shows enemies (red), allies (blue), asteroids and junk (amber) and some anomalies (purple) as dots on the radar.
• Deep Space Scanner - detects contacts from 4000u up to 10000u and shows them as fading sonar echoes on the radar edge, in sync with its rotating dish.
• Both scanners are available in the new Scanners row of the technology shop.

New Block - Anchor Repair Supply (Imperial Perimeter only)

• Rebuilds 1 destroyed block at every jump between fights, for each installed supply (they stack).
• At repair anchors it adds to the normal repair, but at regular jumps blocks are rebuilt without refilling the Hull Points of surviving blocks - the full repair stays exclusive to repair anchors.

New Weapons - Point Defence Turrets

• PDT Kotomi and HPDT Kotomi are automatic turrets that target incoming missiles and torpedoes first, then asteroids. With no such targets in range, they fire at the enemy ship instead.
• They deal explosive, low damage, so they are very weak against energy shields but great against ships with a thin layer of armor.
• Their bullets explode mid-air, hitting all missiles, rockets and asteroids in their range.
• They coordinate fire and targeting - when shooting missiles they try to target different ones instead of all firing at the nearest, and when attacking the enemy ship they coordinate fire into a fan-like spread of bullets.
• Their bullets are fast, but they are still normal bullets that don't change speed or direction after the shot - at high speed they can still miss.

New - Block Damage Visuals

• Blocks now show progressive crack and damage overlays as they take hits, so you get an at-a-glance read on your hull's condition mid-fight.

Drones and Tech

• Active drones per side are now capped - drone bays queue their launches when the sky is full.
• Technology shop reorganized into labeled rows (Kinetic, Energy, Engineering, Scanners, Imperial Perimeter Only) with vertical scrolling.

Quality of Life

• New settings: Enemy Indicators (hide the red screen-edge arrows) and Drift Arrow (a white arrow on the radar showing the direction your ship is actually drifting).
• Radar and speed indicator can now be moved and scaled in the battle UI editor, and UI elements can be scaled up to 4x (previously 2x).

Performance & Fixes

• Big optimization of bullets.
• Missiles search for new targets much less aggressively when nothing is in range, which also improves performance.
• Better sound mixing - overall, all sounds should be better and no longer bugged.
• Various fixes to Imperial Perimeter repairs.

- Captain Technician