Alex there is another issue I was wondering you could take care of.
Though more relevant for mods, if there is a ship variant (either player made or not) that requires a weapon that is no longer present it crashes the entire game on startup. It should be possible, from what others have said, to leave the relevant slot for that weapon empty if it finds the weapon it is looking for no longer exists then popup a warning where the player can see it. Perhaps on the main menu once the preload is complete, the mission screen when starting up a scenario that includes the relevant ship (requiring you to acknowledge the warning before starting the mission) and in the campaign refit screen when selecting the relevant variant in the autofitter.
IIRC for missions this is fixed - it should no longer crash when there's a saved mission variant with a no-longer-existing weapon.
Alex, would you mind sharing screenshots of the in-game spec-sheet for both of these new ships? Or is it still 
material?
Ah, I'd prefer not to spill everything on these, apologies!
Alex, another quick question, any chance to expand the current beam weapons? i would kill for a medium/large tactical laser or a large graviton beam. I can see so many fun specialized builds opening up
Hmm - just in general, I'm not very keen on "same thing, but larger/smaller" kinds of weapons. "Combat" beams are particularly subject to this because they tend to have the same range regardless of size, and don't have a lot of other variables to tweak. Where, for example, the Mark IX is in some ways a bigger Heavy AC, but there are enough differences - range, recoil, burst size, etc - that it can more get away with it.
Alex, any plans for more in-depth colony fleet composition mechanics so it will be more than "get as much FP as possible"?
No - it's all auto-resolved behind the scenes anyway, so it feels like adding detail there is a waste.
Any plans for Neutrino Detector changes?
I keep meaning to look at it at some point; we'll see!
Two ideas for story point spending:
1: Spend at a comm relay to not get purged at the next maintanence, no matter how many sniffers player has.
2. Spend at a planet to destroy pather cell and stop pather plot against that planet. Usable and both NPC and player colonies. Doing so at the first even gets the player some good reputation.
Thank you for the suggestions! (Just in general, these are probably starting to get a bit off-topic for this thread.)
How do the updates usually affect faction/ship mods?
I ask because i've been working on my own mod for sometime and while its pretty mechanically simple and i'm curious as to how much i'll have to go back and redo, if any at all, and if so knowing might give me an idea of how to prep.
To clarify its mostly all handmade sprites with only some of the fighters partially kitbashed from the base game, it doesn't use any of the library mods (Magiclib, etc.) and doesn't have any custom hullmods or systems. For now its only custom ships, weapons, and projectiles using mainly recycled code from the base game. The most i've done with the recycled code is change variables, moved some things around and cleaned up after the Ship/Weapon Creator twisting the code into knots.
Thanks for any info!
I think your stuff will more or less just work. If the code happens to be using some parts of the API that changed in a break ways (of which changes there aren't many) then it'd need to be adjusted, but the changes on your end - if even necessary would be pretty minor.
I've got a tiny little bit of extra insight regarding the Reserve Deployment bug: the fighters will not self-destruct not only if the carrier retreats while they are deployed, but also if it is disabled or destroyed anywhere on the map.
Thank you! Noted; still haven't had a chance to look.
Oh yeah this reminds me, giving full stats right now is probably too much and they could change in the meantime, but I'm reaaaally curious what's the flux dissipation of these ships. If I had to guess I'd estimate Fury has around 550 while the Champion has 600. Warm or cold?
Let's play. 
Shrike has 350, Medusa has 400, Aurora has 800. My guess is around 600 for Fury.
Eagle has 525, Dominator has 450. My guess is around 550 for Champion.
The latter guesses are spot on, good job
(I suspect at this point those both new ships have received extensive playtesting and their stats are ready, hence my question above)
Not really, actually - you'd be surprised!
By the way Alex, have you ever solved the issue with ships randomly stopping when burning in and loosing the boost? I thought it was from asteroids or something and you perhaps solved it already, but someone said he's getting all his ship robbed from burning in boost, which doesn't sound good, so I wanted to check.
Oh yeah i'd love to see this fixed. I always assumed it was from asteroids too but not entirely sure. It's most annoying when your ship already lost it before you've even entered the visible part of the map, and ofc it usually seems to happen during a pursuit.
Whenever it happens it's due to collision danger as far as I know, I'm not aware of any bugs affecting this. I mean, it sucks if your ship stops burning in because there's an asteroid that probably wouldn't have hit it but was enough to set off the emergency braking maneuver, but, well.
If there's an issue where it happens when it shouldn't, I'd love to know more about it!
(Btw, I did just now make it so that the tiny asteroids from rings that do no damage don't factor in here. They shouldn't have much impact regardless, though, but thinking about it, it's actually possible they might cause smaller ships burn to cut short... hmm. Well, regardless, not anymore!)
Hey Alex,
Will memory leaks be solved?
I like playing with a lot of mods but my game slows down to a crawl even though I increased the amount of Ram the game could use to maximum. 
Hey! Replied to the same question on twitter; let me paste here for completeness' sake:
Well - I've fixed one significant vanilla leak, and added something that makes detecting leaks easier. But ultimately *I* can't fix a leak if it's in a mod, or make it impossible for it to happen, so for whatever leaks there are in mods, that's up to the individual modders.
