 This is a Witchspace News special report, I'm Commander Burr. So Frontier who are attending the Gamescom Expo in Germany have just dropped a new trailer and the first solid details about the new fleet carrier system. You can see the trailer footage running underneath at the moment and we're going to break down what we know and also speculate a little on what we don't know. So here's the facts. The commander will be able to purchase one carrier each for what Frontier are describing as a large amount of credits. The ship will be purchasable for players of the base game as well as horizons. In total the carriers have 16 landing pads, that's 8 large, 4 medium and 4 small pads and players will be able to set permissions to allow other players to land at their carrier. All fleet carriers will have rearm, refuel and repair services. Commanders will be able to choose a varied number of loadouts for their carriers to support a number of different role choices. The role chosen for the carrier will govern the availability of services, modules and ships across the following disciplines. Bounty hunting, mercenary work, pirating, trading, smuggling, mining, exploring and search and rescue. Each carrier will have a jump range of 500 light years per jump and will require a new unique fuel resource for that jump. That fuel can either be purchased or mined. Frontier have said that carriers are not destructible but will require a certain amount of upkeep from commanders to maintain their functionality and presence. Your fleet carrier loadout will affect what support vessel travels with the carrier. In the trailer we see 3 of these support vessels. They're all different in appearance which appears to be driven by their role specialisation more on that in a moment. How these smaller capital class vessels operate is currently unknown and Frontier are for the moment staying tight lipped on the subject. It does seem that your carrier loadout will not be fixed and you can change the functionality and thereby change the support vessel but this will cost credits. How you change that loadout will be covered in a future live stream. Only one fleet carrier will ever be present in an instance meaning you'll never see multiple carriers together. The carriers cannot be directly steered from the bridge like a regular ship but rather a jump from system to system via the galaxy map. So that's what we currently know. What's not clear at the moment is what specific purpose the support vessels that travel with your carrier will serve or how they function. What's also not clear is what difference having a carrier along on your adventures will make. For example if you have an exploration themed fleet carrier then what difference to that experience will having that larger vessel with you make. Or if you're mining or trading what difference will a mining or trading themed carrier make to that gameplay. My initial thoughts when hearing these details were that organisations like Operation Ida or the Fuel Rats or the Post Disaster Evacuation Service are likely to find this new class of ship extremely useful. I was also really pleased to hear that every commander will be able to own one. Were they to be restricted to squadrons only that would lock out a huge amount of commanders and essentially mean that only squadron leadership would realistically have access to control the vessels. What's not clear is how the support vessel travels with your carrier. Do they somehow dock with the main vessel when it uses hyperspace or do they have a jump drive all of their own etc. Here at the burpit we've been discussing this and specifically how the support vessels arrive and leave from the same instance as the carrier. As you can see from these screenshots the fleet carrier being shown appears to have a very modular feel particularly to the forward section. What we think may be the case is that the support vessel rather than being a task specific separate vehicle is in fact a mission specific module that attaches to the front of the carrier section and what we're being shown as the fleet carrier at the moment is in fact a generic fleet carrier and when you select a roll the support vessel replaces that front section forward of the landing base. Now this is of course wild speculation but when you look at the mercenary specific ship featured about halfway through the trailer the various sections of that support vessel are almost identical to the forward section of the carrier vessel shown in the background. Whilst it's not so obvious with the other two support vessels shown you could argue that they could work in a similar fashion. A frontier attempting to throw us a curveball? Possibly. FDF have clearly made a conscious decision not to show how the support vessel arrives in the trailers we've seen so far but what do you think? Are we on to something here? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. We won't know the truth of it for a while but FDF have promised that the extended details on the fleet carrier system will be shown off in upcoming live streams between now and December. It's worth noting we don't know exactly how many credits a carrier will cost but it will be expensive. All these new fleet carriers coming to the game are going to need funding. Upon release of this news I suspect there's about to be a colossal mining boom. So in summary when you boil down all the details of all this it appears that the fleet carriers are essentially a sort of movable task specific spaceport that will act as a forward base of operations for whatever your operations might be. Here at the burp pit we're quite excited to see what squadrons will make of all this. You could conceivably see a situation where one squadron member is able to field a mining platform, another research and rescue ship and another emersory vessel all moving as part of the same battle group. Squadrons are at their best and the game really shines when commanders are working together so it'll be fascinating to see if fleet carriers tie into this mechanic. Ultimately as with any new in-game system it's all about the new gameplay that is centered around that system and that is what will define the success of fleet carriers going forward. Don't forget between now and December we've also got the next update that FDF have confirmed goes live on September the 18th. That's it for now thanks very much for watching we'll be back later this week with more videos until then O7 commanders follow the greens on the way out and do please keep clear of the toast rack. We very much look forward to seeing you next time