Spartan Reveal

Star Citizen Alpha 3.15.1 is now LIVE in preparation for the IAE which turns on at 4pm UTC (Friday 19th Nov).

BUT first we had Inside Star Citizen: Spartan Warrior

They posed a scenario… you are on Pyro 4… bad visibility, there is an enemy base with air defenses. That’s when you’d use the Spartan or Spartans to take the facility by land. This is the New APC based on the Ballista Chassis and available to driveable at the IAE… that platform is technically called the Atlas Platform.

As defenses and especially air defenses get used more to protect POI and eventually bases ground vehicles will be needed to help assault them and bring in infantry.

Ground vehicles will also be useful for getting troops around in low visibility, through environmental hazards, avoiding radar and various other things that might not mean a ship is the best option.

The vehicle itself has 2 entrances in the center, left and right and a rear folding ramp.

It can carry 8 troops plus their weapons. You are not being to be able to fit titan suits or other vehicles in here tho. In addition to that it can have a single driver.

The vehicle is suppose to be pretty fast… it’s a troop transport after all.

It has a lot more armor than the Ballista. And has a dual size 2 turret operated by the driver that has ??? by default.

CIG suggested carrying more troops by having them stand or sit on top… I mean tanks used to do that. There are ladders on the side of the vehicle, they aren’t functional currently BUT will be in the future.

Redeemer

The ship was designed by backers… the 4 horseman won the next great starship competition with the Redeemer that had teams compete to make a ship for Star Citizen… 

However the ship needed to be updated to CIGs standards and now we have it flyable in Alpha 3.15.1.

It’s become much more of a gunship, with the dropship element being mostly forgotten (that said I think there is ample room for a few marines).

The ship has amazing offensive firepower.

The Gladius helped inform the cockpit for the Redeemer.

The Pilot has access to Ballistic fixed Cannons on the wings and can make use of a front turret too, which can also be taken over remotely by a co-gunner. There is room for another remote gunner who makes use of the rear turret. These turrets are both dual S3 laser cannons.

There are 2 large manned turrets top and bottom.

They both has dual S5 Ballistic Gatlings.

There is access to the components internally.

Seats for Crew / Marines.

Door a floor via the ladder there is a food area, 4 bunks which are also escape pods, a toilet and a 2SCU cargo area. The entry exit is done from a ramp here.

The nacells (if that’s the right word) open and close based on velocity… they look very cool

Alpha 3.15.1 is out the door now too it adds the Redeemer, Ares Ion and Inferno and the

volumetric clouds with internal VFX onto microTech. This first implementation will only be available around microTech with other planets coming in future releases.

They Updated all existing guards in the CBD area of Lorville to a CBD variant of the Quirinus Armor. This armor is sweet…  You can get the Quirinus Tech Artimex Armor in the PU now at shops around Lorville I believe.

There has been a Dropped Item Performance Polish – Adding dropped clutter prevention to avoid extreme performance issues when players drop hundreds of items into a single area. This will limit dropped carriables to 10 per 7 meter radius sphere and block further items being dropped until out of this range.

Also a Medical and Downed State UI Polish Pass – Increasing the size of text on Incapacitated screen. Added name and distance of player who accepted revival beacon on the incapacitated screen. Added label to corpse marker. Add option to PIT menu to dismiss corpse marker. Dismiss corpse marker based on interaction. Increased visibility of limb damage text when healing yourself with a medical tool. Added a marker to the players last corpse to help them find it after death.

They Updated loadout and health to increase the difficulty of Eliminate Boss UGF missions.

They have Re-scaled shields to have less drastic benefits in the A and B category for  sizes 1, 2 and 3

Fixed scatter gun damage.

A whole host of major and minor bugs were dealt with with NPCs, inventory, items disappearing, ships being in unknown states and crashes.

There are still some other known issues that you might want to be aware of:

• Bounty hunter mission updates slowly on a slow server
• After a server crash, attempting to reconnect may result an infinite loading screen and being unable to interact with the menu. Players may need to exit the game and reload after a server crash to fix this error.
• Players cannot repair, refuel, and rearm at outposts
• MFD screens are often blocked by cockpit interaction prompts
• Items stored in long term persistence such as mined gems are currently not stackable (This is something that will be coming in a future update)
• Swapping weapons has a chance to drop or remove weapons
• When in combat, NPCs can get stuck in cover when trying to exit
• Announcer audio callout for “Match over. You have won/lost the match” can be heard multiple times at the end of a round in Arena Commander
• When undocking, ships will occasionally become caught on the docking arm instead of detaching smoothly

Boom that’s it for your 3.15.1 fix until the IAE starts later today… there is a lot going on at the IAE and loads of vehicles and ships to try, new ones to be revealed beyond the Spartan too.