Ship-Launched Fighters Coming To Elite Dangerous: Horizons

After yesterday’s reveals of passenger missions and the tourism locations for Patch 2.2: The Guardians, Frontier today revealed Ship-Launched Fighters coming to Elite Dangerous: Horizons. This feature as its name suggests allows you to deploy fighter craft to assist you in combat.

You accomplish this by installing Fighter Hangar modules in much the same way you install Planetary Vehicle Hangars for SRVs today. You can install the template for the type of ship and loadout you require into the Fighter Hangar and your ship manufactures them in the field as you need them using resources you need to restock roughly every 6-8 ships. The amount of ships you can create hasn’t been tuned yet but the idea is to think of them almost like ammunition.

Because of the size of the hangars, only the larger ships in the game will be capable of housing them. At launch that will include the Anaconda, the Beluga Liner, the Federal Corvette and Gunship, the Imperial Cutter, the Keelback and the trusty Type-9.

When Patch 2.2: The Guardians goes live you’ll be able to use three different fighters, the lightly armoured but fast Federation F63 Condor, the fragile but very maneuverable Imperial GU97 Fighter and a new ship, the Independent Taipan which is heavily armoured but slow and also has fold-up wings.

You can deploy a fighter from the newly redesigned Role panel which then transfers control to yourself whilst the AI takes over looking after your ship. This enables you to consider taking less armaments on your main ship loadout as you can defend yourself via fighters, or even use them as a damage boost for your already pimped out combat loadout. Once done fighting you can request to dock and land back on your ship or you can lose them to the nothingness of space and leave them behind.

The other headline feature revealed was the concept of NPC Crew. You can recruit crew from the new Crew Lounge area on stations where individuals of varying expertise and cost hang out. They’ll take a cut of your earnings but you can then use these pilots to fly your fighters or even entrust them with your main ship whilst you are in a fighter.

Also coming with the patch are new paintjobs for the fighters so you can colour co-ordinate your destruction. These features are coming to the game in Patch 2.2: The Guardians in mid October with beta access to those eligible at some point before then.

Frontier are continuing to stream sessions until Sunday so we’ll be sure to keep you updated if there are any new developments.

Find part four of our coverage here.