Freighters have received a balance pass. Although our changes don't significantly change the dynamics of the class, we've tried to make each individual freighter worth flying and capable of holding its own. Ship stats have been redone from the ground up, using their models and "lore origin" to give each freighter a - hopefully - unique identity.

Our focus with these changes was to make freighters less aggressive and more defensive, fitting their identity as mini-transports. Powercore recharge has been significantly reduced, particularly for the largest cores. On the flipside, all freighters now have dual mine dropper mounts, making chasing one potentially more dangerous than before. In addition, freighters can no longer mount light fighter guns, as attempting to balance those weapons for ships varying so wildly in size and stats has proven to be a bit of a nightmare.

On the economy side of things, all freighters now have cargo hold sizes in a much narrower range, ranging from 600 to 650 cargo space. This should allow all of them to profitably run freighter-focused trade runs.
Freighter engines have been changed, too, now coming in two variations: regular engines and "Interceptor" engines. Standard freighter engines now cruise at 350 m/s. Interceptor engines, instead, cruise at 400 m/s. Their drawback, however, is that they occupy 100 cargo space, making them less viable for trading. This allows players to continue flying freighters for interception purposes -- like an LPI Grizzly -- while making actual trading freighters more vulnerable to being caught.

While we've done closed balance testing of all freighters, odds are we'll have missed the mark on some of them. If necessary, we'll do a follow-up balance pass addressing outliers in the future.

SHF balance has been a wild ride. We've tried approaching the problem from different angles, and ultimately, failed. The class almost always ends up overperforming in duels while still failing to have the survivability required to be flown in groupfights. Rather than continuing to beat our heads against a wall, we've begun migrating ships in the SHF class to a new, hopefully less problematic (sub-)class: Fighter-Bombers, that will be discussed later in these patch notes.

Also, let's be real: Super Heavy Fighter is a stupid class name.

The Claymore, Dragoon, Recycler and Taurus have been moved into this new subclass. The remaining SHFs have received somewhat of a band-aid balance pass, hopefully making them slightly less rough around the edges until they, too, can get a rework.

Fighter-Bombers are a new subclass of bombers. They are what you'd expect: bombers with fighter traits. Their powercores are a little less generous than those of full-blown bombers, but their agility is superior to any other ship in the class. They trade the ability to mount class 4 bomber heavies for the ability to mount a full rack of six class 8 and 9 fighter guns.

While they have neither the agility of fighters nor the full anti-capital DPS output of a bomber, the fighter-bomber class makes up for this with loadout variety. We're looking forward to seeing how players end up using these ships.

In addition to the before-mentioned SHFs, two new ships are joining the fighter-bomber roster: the Civilian "Vulture" and the Corsair "Evocatus".

While we're on the subject of loadout variety, bombers have received some extra equipment, and the Corona Beam Cannon has received some buffs.

Five House-specific weapons are being added: the Bretonian "Carver", the Gallic "Vanquisher", the Kusari "Redeemer", the Liberty "Thunderbolt" and the Rheinland "Firestorm". These are similar in function to the existing "Render" Bomber Energy Cannons. One more open-use weapon is being added: the "Sunderer". Enjoy.

The Corona Beam Cannon now has a small, 2.5 degree firing arc. This greatly increases its usefulness against smaller targets, like other bombers, fighters and even freighters. We quickly learned that this makes the weapon extremely strong against these ships, however, and increased its energy consumption from 426 to 852 energy per shot. To make the weapon better against larger targets, where it also needed some help, we've raised the weapon's large ship multipliers:


The end result is a high-damage, high-energy-use burst damage weapon that doubles as a viable anti-snub weapon.