I've fallen a bit behind with the newsposts lately, so here's a recap of what's happened recently, with a longer explanation at the end:

1.7.4
- Ships no longer get repaired for free when docking to a station or capital ship.
- Ship repair cost is based on whether the ship you're trying to repair can be purchased locally and the cost of the ship at the current station.
- misc lua bug fixes
- storms cannot be disabled through lua commands anymore

1.7.5
- Storm Radar Extender is now available at select stations.
- fixed client bug that showed mission buttons at the wrong time.
- stations list all addons available at the station instead of hiding addons that are unpurchasable
- OrunProcessor is worth 10 credits
- fixed bug with repairing ship as buying ammo for it in ship select menu

1.7.6
- Radar distance in storms is now properly limited
- Ship engine sounds for other ships play the proper sound now
- 'This item is not for you' message for unpurchasable addons has been replaced with a more appropriate message
- 'Locally produced trade good' message no longer appears for addons
- proximity warning settings are saved when they change instead when you log out
- bar notification setting is properly saved now
- all new chars should get the tutorial now
- fixed misc lua errors

1.7.7
- Capital ships, Queens and the Leviathan now have shields

Now for the longer explanation of the bigger changes. Ship Repairs now cost money.. so if you damage your ship in combat (or colliding with another vessel, or whatever), any station you bring it to will charge you money to fix it. The only exception being the EC-89, which is universally "free", and repairs are subisized by your nation's government. For all other ships, the cost of repairs are based on either: the price of your ship at that station if available, OR, the price at the nearest station with an added "duty" for every given wormhole hop. So, if you're repairing a special faction-only ship, far from its manufactured point of origin, it may be quite costly to repair.. more than it cost new. However, if the ship is sold locally, the repair cost should be reasonable, unless the local faction does not like you very much, the general pricing effects of faction standing impact repairs in the same way as purchases.

Storms limit your radar properly to 500m, unless you have a special Storm Radar Extender addon (small port) which is manufactured by a specific UIT corporation. More addons of this sort will be coming in due course. In addition, developments are underway to create actual *visual* limitations in storms, as well as the limitations to radar. The hope is that this will lead to some tense and interesting gameplay, as people seek to find or avoid enemies within a dense fog packed with asteroids.

Capital ships, Queens and the Leviathan have shields. This was done in order to better adapt the larger ships for multi-user "PvE" type battles. The Leviathan was always intended as a large scale opponent, to be faced only by a Guild or other organized group. Shields help us achieve this, as they regenerate automatically at a fixed rate with a ceiling of total shield capacity. Once the shields have been depleted, then the actual hull of the vessel (and turrets) can be directly attacked and damaged. If no damage is made to the ship for a fixed period of time (currently 30 minutes), the shields will effectively be "repaired" and go back up. As an example of shield capacity, the Leviathan recharges at a rate of 15,000hp per second, with a total strength of 250,000hp. Thus, many pilots organized together with heavy weaponry are required in order to deplete the shields faster than the 15k/s recharge rate, and continue to deplete it long enough to exhaust the 250,000hp total capacity. The numbers for shields are in the midst of being tweaked, as well as the functionality of the graphical "shield effect". The Queens are currently due to be made a little easier to destroy, and the graphical shield effect should soon only be visible when shots impact on the shields, rather than all the time (how it is currently, which obscures a lot of the ship graphics). There's a bug with NPCs and shield interaction, right now, but that will be fixed in an upcoming release this week.

We've also added several new missions and mission-trees, most of which have been aimed specifically at newer players. We do have a lot of missions in the works, however, so expect more to come along in the near future. In addition, because the Leviathan now presents a more formidable target, missions tying this PvE target in with high-level missions and acquisition of interesting new items is also planned.

That's it for now, more announcements coming. Stay tuned.