Welcome back for this month's update.  Lots of secondary combat mechanics added to spice up combat.

Dodging

Ships can now "dodge" by pressing spacebar. This will give a boost in the direction the ship is moving in. By default small ships have 2 charges, medium ones have 1, and large ones have 0. Maxing reactors grants 1 extra charge. Grants 1 charge every 10 seconds for now. Overloading will reset all charges.

My hope is this will make flying small ships a little more fun and agile without straight up giving them high amounts of base speed which is problematic in its own way, and to give additional reason both to max reactors and to avoid being overloaded.

More importantly, it conveniently sidesteps a problem I hope to avoid where there's a bunch of redundant movement abilities that all essentially do the same thing. Movement abilities in general tend to outshine everything else in a lot of games frankly, and it usually kickstarts a form of power creep where non-mobility things tend to either fall to the wayside or get really overbearing artificial buffs just to keep up. By giving every ship a weak secondary movement ability, the hope is I can focus on adding more interesting and diverse ships without feeling like those ships will under perform.

Status Effects

I did some rewrites to improve the way status effects are handled. Weapons now require multiple hits in order to build up status effects, and status effects decay over time unless the threshold is met to actually invoke the effect. The rewrites also consequently made it easier to have a weapon apply multiple status effects.

In addition to that I completely reworked ion damage into a status effect rather than being its own special thing. This streamlines a bunch of code and also makes it impossible to be stunlocked with pure ion damage builds given status immunity windows. Weapons now have an ionization chance, and ionizing a ship will roll for each weapon based on this chance. I haven't messed with it too much, but the plan would likely be that more powerful or larger weapons can be subtly balanced by making them extremely likely to be disabled on taking ion damage.

New Status Effects:

• Gunked Up: Turrets rotate much slower.
• Burning: Vent rate reduced.
• Ionized: Randomly disables several weapons for several seconds.
• Engine Burnout: Randomly disables several engines on the ship. The engines that are disabled will affect corresponding movement proportionately. For instance losing 1 of 5 back engines will mean traveling forward 20% slower. Side engines affect strafe and turn speed, and back engines affect reverse speed.

Weapons

The Fork and Thorn Smart Launchers are now Armament type.

Plasma Inducer flamethrower weapon will now apply burning status.

New Weapons

New weapons added, mainly to the Kleptocracy.

• Added Splitter Medium Beam Weapon. Essentially a beam shotgun.
• Added Honeydew support weapon. Does minimal damage but applies the gunked up status effect.
• Added Kneecapper medium and small anti-engine missile launcher. Applies engine burnout status effect.
• Duster: Small missile mount that behaves like a close range shotgun.
• Urchin Needle Launcher: Small ballistic. Fires darts at high speed.
• Voidthrower: Like a flamethrower but...void.

Autoturret Collisions

On a complete whim I was playing around with giving autoturrets a solid collision box. Kind of worked but needs more iteration.

Weapon Armor

Weapons now support contributing to armor. In general, equipping weapons will lower the armor in the part of the ship they rest in, with larger weapons taking away more armor. This gives me yet another knob I can tweak to balance certain weapons and add more faction identity.

Weapon Ion Resistance

Ion Resistance is now a weapon attribute. When the ion status is invoked, each weapon will have a random chance of being ionized. 

Hullmods

New Hullmods

• Anticipation: Increases the prefire delay for any weapons with a delay, for the benefit of extra damage.
• Balanced: Negative hullmod. Having asymmetric weapons equipped will create a debuff to turn speed and movement. Effect scales with how big of a difference there is.
• From The Hip: Removes firing delay from weapons with a delay. Decreases range and adds a massive amount of spread.
• Finder's Keepers: Grants credits on killing enemy ships, based on ship size. Kleptocracy perk, naturally.
• Network Effect: Each beam weapon gets +5% damage, for every beam weapon equipped. I expect this to be a bread and butter perk of the Glith, given how beam spam is their thing.Pinpoint: Increases turn rate of all beam weapons
• Rear Guard: Weapons in the back half of the ship will gain a 15% damage increase and turn rate increase.

Hullmod Changes

I went through and fixed/added flavor text to a lot of existing hullmods, since there wasn't really a standard format for them and many were empty until now.

I swapped around a few hullmods to factions that they made more sense on. There's still a lot up in the air regarding faction identities, and as I continue to add more content and mechanics this will become clearer. Things that made sense on one faction may end up later making much more sense on another, so I'll move them as needed.

Changes have been made to existing hullmods to affect dodging:

• Faulty Reactor lowers dodge charges by 1
• Critical sets dodges to 0
• Orbital Boosters grants an additional dodge charge

Bug Fixes:

Shift clicking in the ship editor no longer bypasses hardpoint size checks.