From the desk of Elite: Dangerous Executive Producer Michael Brookes...



"I know you are all waiting patiently for the Powerplay beta to start and I can confirm that we’ll release the beta on Tuesday 26th May. As I’ve previously mentioned the update is huge and affects all aspects of the game, so we’ll continue working through the bank holiday to prepare for Tuesday’s release. Considering the scale of changes we’re calling on everyone who has beta access to make sure they dive in and help test this update.



Following up on a few of the items from previous updates I can also confirm that the extra time means that the collision law changes I talked about last week will be included in the Powerplay update. In another follow up our customer service team now have some additional tools to help tackle cheating. This week people have been banned for cheating at community goals and for account trading. One person was also banned for spamming the game servers with a vast number of spurious requests. Thanks for all of your feedback on this issue and please continue to report any incidents that you encounter.



The trial for community driven translations for Spanish has started and thanks to everyone who is getting involved with this. Assuming that it goes well then we will be looking to expand this to other languages. Translations for the currently supported languages will be updated and incorporating much of the feedback we have received.



I can reveal some more changes that will be in the Powerplay update, the first of which are the new notifications when you are promoted to the next rank in the Pilots Federation – although I had to reset my save to test that one! Mining values on asteroids are now stored on a Commander basis so you cannot mine a mined out resource. And for a different type of mining – mines will now do Thermic as well as explosive damage and so making them a bit more effective.



As with all of our updates there’s a considerable number of fixes and tweaks including some stability fixes for the Mac and PC versions. The black hole effect was missing in certain systems - this has now been fixed. The docking computer will now work at outposts. We’ve also made shields persist into supercruise so you can no longer gain an instant recharge by skipping into supercruise and then back into the fight.



Finally, as a sneak peek on one of the two new ships, the base Imperial Courier is a reasonably quick ship (Speed 277) with a modest jump distance of 7.81 light years. It costs just over twice as much as the Lakon Type 6. It has three medium hardpoints with 4 utility hardpoints and as standard 12 tonnes cargo capacity."