VO 1.8.275-276 include:- Corvus Greyhound turbo thrust increased from 350 to 450.- Mines now persist for 30 minutes.- Added a Drain Proximity Mine that drains power cells by 250 units when it explodes. It is available at some Serco stations and requires a high faction standing to purchase.- Added ability for players attacked in monitored and guarded sectors to attack back in self-defense without any factional loss if they kill their attacker. This self defense ability persists for 15 minutes from the last hit by either player or until the original attacker dies for any reason.Lots of other changes in the works, particularly with persistent capships. We're just working through a lot of different edge cases and making sure they're all handled. Hopefully that will debut next week.

VO 1.8.273-274 include:- Music now crossfades when changing sectors.- Killing 3 players in a 7-day period, within a single faction's Guarded space, will result in that faction placing Temp KoS status on the killer for 24 hours. Exceptions are made for killing players of Hated or lower standing with the local faction, and active duels. This only impacts Guarded regions (ie, station sectors). Corvus stations ignore all kills and are not affected by this change. - Linux Sandybridge and Haswell Intel drivers use full shaders now.- Lowered the default texture detail settings for Android devices with 512megs or less of system memory.- Other internal changes.We're putting quite a bit of time into enhancements to the faction system, aiming to allow self-defense in monitored and guarded space, as well as other improvements. Beyond this, we expect persistent capships to debut in the near future. A little later in the month of January, you should see some changes to game balance that are likely to continue in the first two quarters of 2014.Many more announcements to come, including the overall plans for VO 1.9 and 2.0. Happy new year, everyone!

The Holiday Promo mentioned in the Holiday Newsletter is now in effect! Any previous subscriber may play for free between now and the 1st of the year. Happy Holidays, everyone.Ten new player-created missions have been rolled out, some of which allow access to manufacture new types of addons! Check them out.Several Events are in the pipe, be sure to stop by for the Sedina B8 invasions expected tonight, as well as another one on the 27th, a tube Race Tournament on the 28th, and Nation War on the 29th. See the front page, or the in-game listing for details.We also have some ship updates! Check out the new Camo Edition of the Corvus Greyhound, available exclusively to Long Term Subscribers.Aside from this, we also have totally updated all the standard Vulture graphics, as well as the Anniversary Edition you can see below. This ship has many color variations, depending on the selected color palette, there are some pretty fascinating and unique combinations.

VO 1.8.272 includes:- Plasma Annihilator has been buffed and re-balanced per the Suggestions Forum thread. - Group member mines are now blue on the radar.- Android gamepad virtual mouse sensitivity and axis invert settings are now configurable in Options -> Advanced -> Controls -> Mouse.- Fixed Android touch-HUD so the elements don't overlap in 1080 mode.- Fixed possible crash on the Amazon Appstore version if GameCircle fails to initialize.Work is continuing to move forward on Capship Persistency and other features, along with the debut of some new graphics and ship variant types. Stay tuned!

VO 1.8.271 includes:- Mine persistency! Your mines no longer disappear when you log out or change sectors.- Because mines now persist, if you get Temp KOS with the faction that owns the station you're currently in, you will get launched out or thrown to your home station if you don't have a flyable ship.- Added preliminary Leap Motion support for the Windows version. 6 new binds are available: LEAPOX, LEAPOY, LEAPOZ, LEAPTX, LEAPTY, LEAPTZ; where LEAPO* are the three axes of orientation and the LEAPT* are the three axes of position. When a Leap Motion device is detected at startup, flight-assist is enabled, mouse-look is disabled, and LEAPOX, LEAPOY, LEAPOZ, LEAPTZ default to Pitch, Turn, Roll, and Accel analog controls respectively. - Fixed button positions in the one-click login menu for mobile devices.- Default Moga binds have changed to be more usable.- Changed the default invert mode for the Right-Stick Y axis on mobile gamepads.- The D-Pad on Android gamepads can now be used to select controls in the UI.We've delayed making this official announcement until we were pretty confident in the reliability of this recent release, which heralded major changes to the persistency of universe objects, while also giving a window on things to come. The persistency of player content will be a major thread running through much of our development in 2014, as we continue to add more tools with which players may impact and influence the face of the galaxy. This will eventually lead to our long-awaited goals of an explorable and conquerable expanded universe of massive scope.In the meantime, we're still fixing issues and polishing up the new gameplay as we add it. You can expect improvements to HUD and mine friend/foe identification in the near future, along with other tweaks and fixes. Please continue to submit Support Tickets, Bugs forum posts, and Suggestions forum posts for aspects you think should be improved.Beyond persistency, we've also done a lot in the last few weeks to improve the game's graphical fidelity on high-end Android devices, as well as the default interface experience on micro-console devices like the GameStick, OUYA and Mad Catz MOJO. Tweaks and improvements here will continue. It's not a trivial thing to shoehorn an MMO developed for a mouse-and-keyboard onto a mobile device, and it's even harder still to make it a pleasant experience with only a game controller, but we're working hard to improve the interface and polish that use case.The Leap Motion is a fascinating device, a next-generation "air" controller, able to detect very fine movements in fingers, opening doors to a lot of really cool "sci-fi" interface possibilities and