ΔV: Rings of Saturn News

• A new cognitive enhancer is available at drugstores across Enceladus. It allows ship captains to retain memories of previous encounters with other ships, factions and players, making subsequent encounters with the same ships more consistent.
  
• The Enceladian Tuning crew was found to often leave the ship computer running after the initial examination of the ship. This wasted quite a lot of power and caused the performance on the Enceladus station to degrade after entering the Tuning menu until you left the station. The crew was instructed to power down any hardware they used after they finished working on it.
  
• Improved performance of the Fleet and Dealer menus.
  
• When you acquired an encounter location via dialogue near the inner or outer edge of the rings, you could find that location much closer than it was supposed to be, up to spawning just next to you as soon as you finished up the dialogue. A proper distance will be maintained now.
  
• Crew leaving damaged derelicts will turn off their autopilot.
  
• The time of travel display on the Astrogation console will now be consistent with the distance display, both showing zero when you are near a spot where you lost track of a destination.
  
• The Ganymedean base now has access to cognitive enhancers, so it will remember your personal reputation when you return to it. This shifts the balance of gaining the favour of the base itself with trade, smuggling, and other personal favours and prevents the base from only vaguely remembering both good deals they had with you, as well as your attacks on them.
  
• When you deal with the Ganymedean station, the deal will be marked as accepted once you actually accept it, not when it's first mentioned.
  
• Fixed a vertical splice visible sometimes on a prototype K44 ship's hull.
  
• Fixed a potential crash to desktop if you exited the Tuning menu with the sensor simulation running.
  
• The banding-like wave formations in the rings should now be limited to places where they are actually placed on the map.
  
• You can't extort pirates over and over again by shooting them just after you finish talking.
  
• If you deploy a B8 claim beacon and then pick it up again immediately, you will now be able to re-deploy it in another spot.
  

[h3]Runasimi releases quantum communications[/h3]
Runasimi Inc. has introduced an advanced communication system tailored to meet the demands of real-time interlunar communications. This groundbreaking system employs a sophisticated quantum data transmission method in conjunction with Runasimi’s proprietary digital signal processing algorithms. This innovative approach ensures seamless and nearly instantaneous communication over interlunar distances, setting a new standard in space communication technology.



[h3]New flexible astrogation regulatory[/h3]
Responding to the dynamic and challenging conditions of Saturn's Rings, the Enceladian Astrogation Authority has significantly relaxed its astrogation regulations. This adjustment grants astrogators the liberty to traverse the debris-strewn expanses of the Rings without the encumbrance of filing detailed flight plans. Now, spacecraft within the Rings are merely required to maintain a record of potential destination coordinates, substantially minimising administrative tasks and bolstering operational agility. This regulatory update is designed to stimulate exploration and mining activities by streamlining procedural requirements, all while upholding the essential principles of space traffic safety and accountability.



[h3]Comprehensive astrogation console update[/h3]
Minding LF's latest update to its astrogation consoles, aimed at revolutionising the way astrogators sort and select navigation targets, has been released amidst a swirl of controversy. By introducing new algorithms for easier sorting and recovery of previously lost tracking data, the update offers astrogators unparalleled flexibility and precision in mission planning. However, its launch closely following the Enceladian Astrogation Authority's new, more lenient navigation regulations has led to accusations of unfair competition, with critics suggesting Minding LF might have had prior knowledge of the regulatory changes.



[h3]Maintenance Logs[/h3]

• You can now call ships you talked with previously; most of the time, they will answer.
  
• New simulation range controls in the settings menu allow you to limit the physics simulation area and improve performance on low-end systems.
  
• New astrogation protocol. POI which you lost track of will still be selectable on your astrogation console - they are still contained in the ship logs, after all, it's just your current astrogator that has trouble finding them. You may attempt an astrogation jump to such a location, but you will arrive at the location that is the best guess of your current astrogator.
  
• Additional icons on the Astrogator console allow you to see different classes of astrogation destinations more easily.
  
• You can now label your astrogation destinations with different colours, making it easier to distinguish one moonlet from another.
  
• You can now zoom in on the Astrogation console visual map.
  
• General astrogation re-balance. Since you can now travel to expired astrogation targets, the base tracking time of your crew was lowered by 25% to account for that.
  
• Claim beacons will now return to the Enceladus Prime station automatically when your claim period expires. Previously, if you did not equip it again and travelled to exactly the same spot, you could find a defunct beacon waiting for you, just as if you just released it.
  
• Map labels on the dive target selection screen and the Astrogator panel will now keep their original size when you zoom in and out.
  
• Enhanced graphics on Enceladus stations. The station now has multiple-resolution images for all distances, so it will look more consistent when viewed at different zoom levels. Most notably, this removes subtle shimmering of the edges when the camera is zoomed away.
  
• OCP-209 HUD now has Bearing and Orientation readouts.
  
• Having your NDCI collision alert set to 10 seconds triggered a zero division, which could gradually degrade the performance of your game during dives.
  
• The settings menu will no longer overflow the Steam Deck screen when you increase the HUD size.
  
• Adjusted the layout of the Settings menu to fit additional controls.
  
• Updated translations.
  

• If your ship was burning torch or thruster discharge at the very last second of the "return to Enceladus" cutscene, it could make thruster flares disappear completely from subsequent dives.
  
• Adjusted physical cargo bay actuator settings on OCP-209. Previous settings sometimes caused the cargo bay to get stuck if your framerate dropped to 15 or less.
  
• The ship spotlight on OCP-209 will not rotate with your habitat anymore.
  

[h3]EPAA discovers new moonlets[/h3]
In a groundbreaking development, during a routine mineral survey, the Enceladian Polar Astronomical Array (EPAA) detected new, previously undiscovered moonlets located in the plane of Saturn's Rings. What sets these celestial bodies apart is their unique characteristic: unlike their predecessors, these moonlets do not form the typical propeller formations observed in planetary rings. This discovery defies the current understanding and theories of moonlet formation and its behavior within the dense and dynamic environment of planetary rings. EPAA has announced plans for an on-site examination slated for later this month.



[h3]New autopilot software regulations[/h3]
A critical announcement issued today by the Enceladian Space Regulatory Commission unveiled comprehensive new regulations, mandating that all spacecraft autopilot systems must be enhanced to include precise tracking of surfaces of larger asteroids and moonlets. This regulatory overhaul has ignited controversy, as there are growing concerns that Elon Interstellar, a frontrunner in autopilot technology with pre-existing surface tracking capabilities, may have influenced the push for these updated standards. Critics contend that this move unfairly benefits the Martian-based conglomerate, triggering a heated debate over the equity of the new regulations.



[h3]Mineral discharge terminal upgraded[/h3]
In response to the unprecedented boom in mining activities within the Rings, the Enceladus Prime ore unloading facility has recently completed a series of significant upgrades to enhance its operational capacity. Having reached their operational thresholds, the previously utilized Armstrong-TX7500 unloading arms contributed to considerable delays, resulting in lengthy queues of mining ships awaiting their turn to offload their valuable yields. The facility has integrated the cutting-edge Tetsuo-series electromagnetic delivery system into its unloading infrastructure to address this bottleneck. This state-of-the-art upgrade is set to revolutionize the station's processing capabilities, promising an astounding increase in throughput efficiency by over 9000%.



[h3]Maintenance logs[/h3]

• Added a new moonlet story event to encounter.
  
• Enhanced autopilot targeting. You can now target a specific spot on the surface of a large object, like a moonlet, and autopilot will align to that spot. This prevents accidents where you click on a wall of a cave you were traversing to have the autopilot spin your ship toward the center of mass of the moonlet, wrecking your thrusters in the process. Now, it will instead point your ship towards the part of the wall you clicked on, wrecking your thrusters in the process.
  
• When you are scrapping your ship paint along a rocky surface, it will not sound like multiple impacts anymore.
  
• Improved performance of ship-mounted spotlights. This will be most noticeable on integrated GPUs.
  
• Improved adrenaline collision detection performance. This lowers the CPU requirement all around.
  
• Improved pathfinding for entities that rarely move, such as space stations. This lowers CPU requirements near such objects.
  
• Entities that cannot move at all will not imagine the paths they could take if they suddenly gain the ability to move. Such electric dreams wasted CPU cycles. They will now dream about android sheep instead.
  
• You can't salvage traveling phage stations anymore. They have their jobs, and they intend to fulfill them.
  
• A quirk in the spawning routines could cause many more rocks to spawn near entities that should not contain rocks inside. This artificially increased the density of asteroids around stations and moonlets and caused waves of asteroids to decrease game performance.
  
• Updated radiation shaders to work with ships that are hidden in caves.
  
• Your astrogator will need to have a way to detect a ship before he can trace it with the tactical marker. This means that they will not mark ships hiding inside caves anymore and can slow down ship identification in dense areas, like propeller formations or around moonlets.
  
• Improved the layout of the dive summary screen. Ores will now be spaced out equally, with unusual finds closer to the center of the screen.
  
• Optimized dive summary screen so that it won't be bogged down - or crash - if you bring hundreds of chunks of raw ore back.
  
• Added extra lights and adjusted a number of shadow settings for the brand-new moonlet event.
  
• Fixed two of the POI events not linking correctly, which caused you to rediscover a plain "moonlet" while you already knew about the secret inside.
  
• Pulse thrusters and torches that ran out of reaction mass during operation continued to burn as long as the control was held, draining the negative mass out of the universe and upsetting the dark matter/energy balance.
  
• The dealership was raising the price of the ships with kinetic and nanodrone systems by more than the system was worth, upsetting the economy somewhat.
  
• Ship plumes from RCS discharge inside moonlets will not be visible on the visual feed.
  
• You cannot astrogate from inside of a moonlet anymore.
  
• If your autopilot velocity limit was set to a number that was not a multiple of ten, the velocity slider on the in-dive Astrogation tab could not be set all the way to the top.
  
• Changed the way docking arms forcefully undock your ship. They are now aware of the ship's orientation or station you are docked to and will eject you away from that ship instead of just moving you the closest way outside the designated docking spot.
  
• Big Bad Wolf will now always stop completely after docking with you.
  
• Changed the physics settings of the External Impact Absorbers. They are now softer, dealing less damage in kinetic collisions, and their collision resolution uses a continuous collision detection algorithm - which should prevent physics glitches when impacting megaton asteroids at high speeds but does decrease the physics performance a bit.
  
• Updated translations.