 This is Witch Based News for Friday the 10th of December 2021. I'm CMDR Buur. In a bumper edition of Elite Dangerous News this week, Update 9 brings patches for Elite Dangerous Horizons and Elite Dangerous Odyssey. As the first new SRV in 6 years arrives in the game I'll share some thoughts on where it and the scarabs sit now. Frontier shows off some work in progress of fleet carrier interiors after footage appears on the internet and loads more. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe and remember to click the little bell icon and select all notifications and if you'd like to help directly support this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. We start this week with news from the Elite Dangerous Odyssey Materials Helper. The third party app that has rapidly become the must have tool for anyone attempting to navigate the Elite Dangerous Odyssey suit and weapons engineering and materials maze had a significant update this week adding a bunch of new features and tools. If you're not familiar with the tool I've linked in the video description to where you can pick it up. The application monitors your Odyssey gameplay while you're playing and keeps track of what on foot materials you already have and what materials you're gathering. You can then interrogate those materials in the app and it will tell you what blueprints or engineer unlocks etc they are used for or if they're utterly useless and just take up bag space. The app also allows you to create a shopping list of materials for the game's blueprints and tells you what on foot environments and settlement types the required materials can be found at and in what buildings your best place to find them in. Amongst the features added this week are support for multiple separate named wish lists and a handy new system to facilitate in-game meetups with other commanders to allow the trading of materials. The application was a complete game changer for me when I first discovered it and it immediately became an essential tool for all my on foot material gathering. As I've mentioned you'll find it linked in the description below. In a surprise move on the frontier livestream last night community managers Arthur and Zack showed off some work in progress footage of the new fleet carrier interiors that will be arriving next year we believe as part of update 10. The move was prompted after the fleet carrier interiors themselves appeared in the game and were discovered by players and subsequently posted on YouTube. Whilst unreachable from within the game by normal means it was possible to glitch the in-game camera system and take a sneaky look at the unfinished artwork inside the carriers bridge and social areas. The frontier footage was hurriedly pulled together yesterday after the leak appeared and is not only quite thorough but of a much higher quality than that discovered by players. It features an actual in-game walk around of the interior space rather than a floating disembodied camera and improved lighting and at one point what appears to be a menu pop up indicating that chairs will be usable. Whilst again this is still very much a work in progress if functioning chairs is a planned feature for carrier interiors it follows that we could be seeing this added to the existing social spaces in Odyssey in the not too distant future. The carrier interior and in particular the bridge with its large viewing window overlooking the landing pads outside was littered with chairs more than 20 by our reckoning. There are also very clearly seats and consoles set aside for the helm and other carrier operations. It would seem logical then that we're finally going to be face to face with our carrier crew whose portraits we've been seeing for the last year or so in the carrier management screen. Maybe now would be a good time to discuss a pay review and the fuelling of the fleet carriers and how the two are intrinsically and inexorably linked. Arthur and Zack made a deliberate point of not answering any questions on the stream about fleet carrier interiors however during the tour we can see a bar, pioneer supplies and Vista Genomics. The last one in particular raises all sorts of possibilities and questions for carriers in the deep black. Is Vista Genomics going to be a default store in the ship and if not will the carrier need to return to port as is the case with fitting any other service on a carrier currently. Vista Genomics would be a huge bonus and very valuable to carrier owners in the DSSA network for example. By necessity however they are distributed across the entire galaxy quite literally. A return to port would be a very significant undertaking to facilitate what essentially equates to opening a shop albeit one that is essential to explorers. The company clearly is not yet ready to share any more specifics but importantly they did reiterate that the Christmas special live stream is coming up next week on the 16th of December and that stream will feature a chat with developers, a proper walkthrough and talk about the feature and what we can expect from it. FDF themselves are not uploading the footage seen last night in a separate video we think they're planning a separate trailer next week but if you'd like to see last night's footage in full there's a link in the video description that will take you right to the part of the stream where the carrier tour starts. Thursday this week brought with it update 9 which meant patches for Elite Dangerous Horizons and Odyssey across both PCs and consoles. The patch to Elite Dangerous Horizons concerned itself primarily with fixes and stability issues which you'll find detailed in the patch notes from the omnipresent Sally Morgan Moore on the official forums, I've linked to those below. Also included in the patch for both Horizons and Odyssey across all platforms was the new multi-limbit controller that we detailed in our update last week. The controller itself is currently the subject of some questioning from the community as, as of the time of this video at least, it comes pre-packaged with some extraordinary mass statistics that make it heavier on its own than some of the smaller ships. This is either an error that's crept into the code or it is in fact made from the matter collected from a collapsed star. The patch to Odyssey brought with it as you'd expect a further raft of update fixes and optimizations. Again the general hearsay that we're getting from the community at large is that frame rates across the board seem to be creeping up as the optimizations take hold and the dark days of May and June now do seem to be a rapidly receding memory. As Frontier announced last week, the ambient light of planetary surfaces got a very significant overhaul with update 9 with planetary surfaces at least now picking up the lighting hues from the local star. As we mentioned last week this is particularly evident at sunrise and sunset. For example if you go to a planet close orbiting something like a brown dwarf you'll get some very deep hues of red and pink reflecting off the ground at the extremes of the day. You can see some example comparisons from pre and post patch on screen now. The big headliner for Elite Dangerous Odyssey was of course the debut of the much anticipated multi-crew capable scorpion combat surface reconnaissance vehicle. The tougher armoured version of Elite's diminutive armed surface rovers features two weapons. The gun is referred to as a surge repeater and is a rapid fire weapon that increases in accuracy and fire rate the longer it's fired for. The missile system we saw in the trailer earlier this week is known as the Aculius and it can be fired prior to lock on as a dumbfire round or as we'd suspected with the benefit of post lock on internal guidance. The vehicle is fitted with thrusters on its wheels and underside but they're not of the size and power we're used to with the scarab meaning it is capable of short hops the gravity of the local environment notwithstanding obviously but it can't perform extended flying manoeuvres like the scarab can. It also accelerates much slower than the scarab and has a significantly slower top speed when it reaches the top of its curve. We're hearing that the scorpion is a significant hill climber however bringing with it some serious talk that isn't evident in the scarab and overall it handles in a much more responsive and predictable way. I freely admit to not being the world's biggest fan of the scarab or that damn car as we call it here and thus I've found the scorpion to be very drivable indeed feeling a lot less like a wet fish on a frozen pond and more like an actual vehicle that is trying to stay grounded. Old school fans of the SRV need not fear however the scarab still very much has its place not only is it still the only reasonable option for speedy traversal of mountainous and rugged terrain but perhaps surprisingly that roof mounted turret still very much has a place. When it comes to hosing small fast moving targets and by that I mean humanoid fleshy meat bags of the type found at settlements then for me at least it would still be the scarab all day long. Once it's targeted something the scarab still sports its signature pinpoint accuracy over significant distance ripping through waves of advancing ne'er-do-wells whilst maintaining the speed and agility to completely fail to still be there when any incoming rounds arrive to meet it. The scorpion however has the hide and shields to absorb a good few more hits which it's going to do given its acceleration curve and lack of jump and you can forget about using that gun even when targeted to hose down the incoming hospitality agents from the settlement you're visiting. As things stand when fired in short bursts it struggles to hit a barn door tied to an elephant tied to a house. Even once it's wasted hundreds of rounds spinning up to its optimal speed peppering the dirt hitting buildings and nearby planets the distribution of rounds at the point of impact is not really tight enough to warrant its use on settlement spawned spongy meat sacks. Once it's managed to land enough rounds its time to kill can be measured as eventually. This is especially true when compared to a scarab operating at a settlement and teaching everyone the true meaning of maybe stay indoors and keep your head down lest you be the recipient of a new piehole. So you may be asking yourself what is the scorpion for? The answer to that question is multi-pronged. As things stand the scorpion and its hilarious roof-mounted fire hose in a severe crosswind really shouldn't be your go to for a less than stealthy settlement raid or even a combat zone. The ground clutter in those environs alone coupled with its lack of thrusters make it an edge nibbler at best and only then if the target has the good graces to stand still. However we're seeing anecdotal evidence at least that if you let one of these things loose on a Goliath one of the larger, angrier brothers of the really not honestly a problem unless you're asleep during the raid skimmers then it starts to come into its own. Better still if there's a separate gunner and driver combination. Also the vehicle appears in these early days at least to be finding its place as a material farmer at guardian surface sites. There's no real need to be nippy there, there's no significant need to be terribly jump capable but being able to easily absorb a surprise beating from a large slow moving target at close range which against you can then deploy the guided missile spewing runaway fire hose that's a different story. Again anecdotally we're hearing here at the burpit that the scorpion might be the new guardian go to. There's also some evidence from our own let's call it science that the diminutive supermini is very capable when it comes to facing down other surface vehicles and whilst that might not be much of an urgent requirement at the moment frontier have hinted at least on streams that NPC SRVs might be in our future. If we had our guess we'd say that the scorpion right now has some limited very specific uses that it's extremely good at and whilst the scarab still definitely has its place you may prefer the driving style of its younger brother for some previously scarab specific work depending on the terrain as the scorpion seems in its element in mostly open ground and as for the wider less specific conflicts and engagements we don't think they've arrived in the game at least not yet but watch this space. Whilst we're still on the subject of the scorpion there are some of the more exclusive paint jobs available for it on the frontier store right now in the shape of midnight blacks and various flavours of Stygian. These are generally an annual time limited option the opportunity for which runs out next Friday the 17th of December and won't usually be available again until this time next year. With regards to sticky issues in the game community manager Sally is maintaining and updating a thread entitled update nine immediate issues of note the thread lists some issues that the company is investigating that immediately impact gameplay following update nine or a previously reported issues that still require some attention following update nine some premium examples of those listed include shipyards not loading scorpion ammo not restocking and ship fire groups being wiped following the patch if there's something particularly sticky that is affecting you it's worth checking out the thread to see if frontier are already aware of it as always you'll find this and everything we've talked about today linked in the description below this video have you bought yourself a scorpion srv and if so what are your feelings about it and what are you using it for currently if you're a console player have you outfitted the new multi-limbit controller and how are you finding it compared to the task specific controllers let us know in the comments below that's it for now thanks very much for watching we'll be back later this week with more videos until then 07 commanders follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack we very much look forward to seeing you next time