When you consider it, two years is a remarkably brief timeframe for constructing a spaceship. Once scheduled for liftoff in 2018, Elite Dangerous‘ long-awaited fleet carriers are lastly, nearly, nearly able to take to the celebs. Today, Frontier introduced plans for beta classes within the coming months, scheduled a full video deep-dive on April 2nd, and revealed simply how a lot a nation-sized supercarrier will set you again.
Spoiler alert: they’re not low-cost.
First deliberate as part of Elite Dangerous: Beyond in 2018, Fleet Carriers have discovered themselves caught within the digital shipyards since. In October final yr, they have been pushed additional again nonetheless to make room for some vital bug fixes.
But now, Frontier are nearly able to set their supercarriers free upon the celebs. Posting on their boards earlier at present, Frontier announced a special pre-recorded “content reveal” stream for Fleet Carriers. They’ll be outlining among the intricacies of establishing your travelling shipyard – and whereas they’ve opted to not do the stream dwell, devs will likely be on-hand in chat to reply questions from pilots throughout the galaxy.
Ahead of that stream, Frontier listed a number of key particulars concerning the upcoming mega-ships. They’ll be capable of journey a whopping 400ly per hyperspace soar – over 10 instances additional than my plucky little Diamondback. Carrying as much as 16 ships that far comes with some caveats, after all. There’s a tough cooldown between jumps, and homeowners might want to refuel with a brand new useful resource named Tritium.
Oh, and it’ll set you again 5 billion credit.
That’s nearly 5 instances extra expensive than the Imperial Cutter, at present Elite’s most costly luxurious warship. It’s impossibly larger than any amount of cash I’ve ever saved in Elite. Of course, it’s probably not for solo flyers like me. If you’re out there for a Fleet Carrier, you in all probability have already got a band of mates serving to you scrimp collectively the money for one in every of these 16-seater unhealthy boys.
Frontier have put aside two public beta classes for fleet carriers. The first, PC-only will arrive on April seventh, with a multi-platform second beta hitting someday in May. Should all go to plan, Fleet Carriers will lastly launch someday this June.
While Elite’s galaxy is way faraway from our Earthly issues, Frontier Developments are soundly not, stressing that every one time-frames are topic to alter.
