VO 1.8.567 includes:

- Capital Ship commanders may now focus turret fire onto a single selected target. The turrets may be bound to a single key or button, like "/bind l +ActivateTurrets". Then, with a single target selected, and that button depressed, any turret that can "see" the target within its respective active field-of-view will fire upon the target. Projectile and energy turret weapons will not fire on targets beyond their maximum range (missile turrets will fire).
- Capital Ship turrets now utilize energy from the central Powercell (Reactor, etc), of a given capship. This is only partially implemented, at the moment, and most weapons still don't use much energy, if any. But, you can expect this to become a factor in due course. This may eventually impact shield strength as well (effectively an offense vs defense tradeoff, based on energy availability).
- Android touch and TV devices with the ES3 renderer will now have Two Lights and Shadows enabled by default. If you wish to disable this, for increased framerate, you can find the settings in Options -> Advanced -> Video.
- Completely new Default touch control flight interface, solely in testing on Android. Existing control configurations will be maintained, but anyone wanting to try the new defaults (recommended), should go into Options -> Advanced -> Controls -> Touch and hit "Defaults". It will utilize..
- Half the touch-screen is now dedicated to steering inputs, which can be made anywhere on that half of the screen (the right side, by default). Touch-to-select on remote objects no longer functions on the "steering" side of the screen, although we will try to add this back in before long, it requires some experimentation. The buttons on the right-side of the screen will continue to work.
- "Touch Look Mode", similar to Mouselook on PC, allows high-precision input on the touchscreen to exceed the turning capabilities of the ship, but the ship will turn to match the new heading.
- "Relative Touch Origin" will consider the point of touch as the "center" of the touch region, instead of the visual-center of the area. Better for adaptation for differing size devices (and various sized thumbs), as well as preventing instant movement on first-touch.
- "Delta Movement" measures the change in movement, instead of accumulating the changes, making it feel more like a "mouse". You may have to lift-up and re-touch if you hit the edges of the input area, but with the new Input Sensitivity settings, this is fairly infrequent.
- Aim Sensitivity range increased from 0-2x up to 0-20x. This extended range is pointlessly "sensitive" for the joystick-style input methods, but is very useful for the mouse-style input, which now defaults to 10x.
- Aim Input Filtering is now enabled by default, this is an existing option that helps smooth out the very high-frequency mouse-style input. It adds a very slight increase in latency, but that is outweighed by the improved smoothness in camera motions.
- Aim Sensitivity curve set to Linear.
- Android Tutorials have been lightly modified to be more compatible with the new default control / flight model. More substantial updates are coming; we know the voice-overs are a little inaccurate now. This is basically a wide-area testing phase as we redo the "early game experience".
- Notes on new input: Whether one prefers the new-default "mouse-look" style, or wants to retain the prior "joystick" style, the new settings give a lot of options and a lot of improvement for either case. For those seeking a joystick-style touch experience, enabling Touch Look Mode and Relative Touch Origin, but disabling Delta Movement, and using a directional aiming curve like Vector Linear can result in an improvement over the previous defaults. But, overall, we believe the new virtual-mouse "Default" style to be the best option.
- The Improved touch-control options will come to iOS, once we fully test and tune them on Android. Releasing on iOS is a bit more arduous, compared to Android, hence the "early" testing on the latter.
- Fix for bug with the CSR race: any registered participant who dies prior to the race start must be homed in the starting sector, or risk forfeit.
- Power consumption of the Capital Rail Cannon has been reduced from 1000 to 250.

Obviously, some really significant changes here. It's important to remember that VO is always in a state of flux. There are a lot of different changes in motion, and not all of them can launch at the same release; we just don't have the development resources to do that (or, alternatively, we would have to release once-a-year). So, for certain categories of gameplay, things will get better with one release, then get worse with another, then get better again, as different pieces become available and the overall system comes into focus.

Capships have always been a heavy work-in-progress. They started originally as kind of a "hackjob" feature, made at loud player-request, and they didn't really work very well. They've evolved a lot since then, and will continue to do so, before the situation is in place that really merits a greater variety and availability of capship types and usage cases. There are still a lot of changes coming, some of them pretty "major", before we'll get closer to their actual intended design.

If you find any genuine Bugs, please let us know via the Bugs forum (or create a Ticket if it's exploitable). If you have feedback on gameplay direction, then the Suggestions forum is the best bet (but keep things positive and friendly).

Hopefully the new Android interface changes will be helpful to people. We'll be watching a lot of our analytics data, but direct feedback is also welcome on Suggestions.

Have a great weekend, everyone!