Fighters are now ship weapons that can be built in, meaning unique carrier builds with special fighters are possible.
Stations are "ships" in the essential ways.
Indeed!
any chance of getting a glimpse into the file structure changes? At this point they have to be... well I'd rather not think about it. ha.
I can post something in the modding subforum if there are enough to warrant it, but even things like "removed these columns in wing_data.csv, added these 3 columns for stations in ship_data.csv" and that sort of stuff would help all us excited modders get up to speed quickly
wing_data.csv is... well, it's definitely different, but it's a small file and the stuff is straightforward. I wouldn't worry too much about that one.
For station modules, there's a "STATION_MODULE" weapon slot type, and in the .variant files, you can slot other variants into it, like so:
"weaponGroups": [{
"autofire": false,
"mode": "LINKED",
"weapons": {
"WS 001": "platform1_Standard",
"WS 002": "platform1_Standard",
"WS 003": "platform1_Standard",
"WS 004": "platform1_Standard"
}
}]
No nesting, iirc, so the plaforms can't themselves have more modules.
*squeals happily like a damn schoolgirl*
This blog post has pulled me from the void.
I'm soooo excited for the next update. Take your time. Or share something that still needs a hotfix down the month or whatever.
I don't care. It's going to be great. You should email rock paper shotgun once this is done, because they would love this. They're huge fans of star control II anyways.
Thank you! Hype-support much appreciated
So modules—what do you have in mind? Obviously we'll see weapon platform modules and you mentioned armor modules but how about shield modules, fighter bay modules and modules that act like the capturable sats in larger battles? The possibilities!
I'd imagine that an outpost couldn't be destroyed if there was an active station in orbit?
All good questions, but the answers are all of the "I couldn't possibly comment at this time" variety. Sorry!
(Obviously, thinking about all these - as mentioned in the blog post, there are some fairly natural implications stemming from the mechanics - but I don't want to speculate too much without being more confident they'll pan out.)
What if the primary station piece is the only module with weapons left, is it invincible?
The primary piece of the station isn't considered a "module". If it's designed to have weapons on it, it should also not have the built-in hullmod ("vast bulk") that makes it invincible. So, basically: no, unless the content is created incorrectly.
Do missiles benefit from the Targeting Supercomputer? (e.g. flight time increase)
They do not, no.
But judging from the ancient sprite (can't believe its finally getting used!) that was planned from the veeery beginning.
How's that for some long-term planning?
I tiny nitpick: Seeing "ISS Götterdämmerung" spelled with "o" and "a" makes my eyes twitch 
I'm, uh, going to blame that one on David. But as long as we're here, I always wondered about this: how acceptable is it to use "oe", "ae", etc in place of umlauts, in otherwise-English text, i.e. "goetterdaemerrung"? Is the degree of eye-twitching more or less than from dropping the umlaut entirely? And a related bonus question: for a native-German mindset, are o and ö "same letter but one has an umlaut" or "different letters entirely"? (There's a similar situation in Russian, and they're very much different letters to the point of both being in the alphabet, but from what I remember of highschool German, the alphabet doesn't include the umlauted letters...)
Edit: part of the reason I'm asking is it doesn't feel right to include umlauts in English text, right. Because they're not part of English! So of the two workarounds (just omit umlaut, vs omit umlaut and add e) which one is more acceptable?
I don't know if anybody mentioned, but that stations looks a bit... small? David wasn't you a bit hungry while drawing that sprite?
Oh, you.
