Here it is! The Lakon Type-10 Defender blueprint.

Hats off to Frontier and whoever modeled this ship. It is one of the most detailed ships in the game. No copy-n-paste left side to right here!

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There was a lot of speculation and a couple of leaks prior to the ship being activated in the game, but now it's here and I have all the details on the newest ship in the Elite: Dangerous shipyard.

What has become clear is that the data-mined information leak was more accurate, or at least less misleading that the XBOX video leak. For example, the stock ship does cost 124,755,342 CR, but the power plant is NOT Class 6 it is Class 8 but comes with the 1750CR Class 6E Power plant fitted instead of a 1,750,00CR Class 8E Power plant (those cheapskates at Lakon!). The FSD supplied is a 6E, but the slot is a Class 7. These made the specifications that appeared in the video a red herring.

So here are the speculation-free 100% accurate, taken-from-the-ship, specifications of the Type-10 Defender.

Looks

The ship is a shaved-down Type-9, but the spolier and folding wing-tips, along with the abundant engine ports, make this ship look very "race tuned".  It is not going to win any beauty contests, but it reminds me very much of the old Thunderbird 2 International Rescue craft, with it's massive size and stubby bulk and huge engines.

Weapons

With nine hardpoints, this ship has a lot of sustainable firepower. Lacking any huge hard-points it is designed to be able to "tough it out" for a long battle, making this an ideal PvE combat ship and most especially one that can take the pounding dished out by Thargoids.

The two Class 1 (small) hard-points are located on the front of the ship either side of the cockpit.

There are then two Class 2 (medium) and two Class 3 (large) hard-points located on the top edge of the ship with the medium hard-point leading.

Then there are two Class 3 (large) hard-points on the underside off the outer engine bulkheads and a single Class 2 (medium) hard-point on the underside off the ship's belly, dead-centre.

In the screen shot above, you can see the Ship Launched Fighter bay lit at the dead-centre of the ship' rear underside.

Handling and speed

With Class 7 Thrusters, same as the Type-9 and more weight, you'd expect this thing to handle like a brick in a pool of treacle, but you'd be wrong! While it isn't going to fly like an Eagle, it turns about the same as an Anaconda with D rated Thrusters. Given a Grade 5 Dirty Drive tuning, it handles even better.

The stock speed is 179m/s, but even with over 3,000 armour on mine, with the dirty drives it cruises at 230m/s and boosts to 280m/s.

The all-important jump range

With a Class 7A FrameShift Drive fitted the ship has a fairly respectable 18.6Ly range fully loaded with armour and module reinforcement. However, a grade 5 engineer upgrade took my jump range to 24ly, which meant when jumping down from Shinrata Dezra to Maia, my ship made 22 jumps, while my wingmate in a maxed-out and engineered Fer-De-Lance took more than 30 jumps with his max range of 16ly.

For such a massive ship, this beast is more comparible with the Cutter in firepower and jump range - certainly my Corvette would not keep up with it.

Does it do what it was built for?

In the name of science, not fun (honest!), we took some Type-10's out to HIP 17694 and attacked a Cyclops Thargoid and despite our ineptitude, we were victorious!

It took two tries and on the first, I got destroyed! But when you enjoy losing 17M CR in rebuy, then you know Frontier have got it right.

The Type-10 Defender

UPDATE: Due to a short-lived bug in 2.4, CMDR Eric Grovum was able to video the Type-10 Defender in the shipyard on the XBOX version of Elite. Sadly, he didn’t have the funds to purchase the ship, but what he did grab added to our overall knowledge. We got a general peek at the shape and some extra stats.

So what’s changed?

We now know the cost will be 124,755,342 CR, which as theorised, is between the Anaconda and Type-9 stablemate. The Defender image shows the little winglets deployed and a very noticeable spoiler (which we saw in photos at the the Frontier Expo and assumed was a ship kit).

The ship description is:

The Type-10 Defender is the result of collaboration between the Alliance and Lakon Spaceways. With the threat of xeno-war looming, the Alliance’s naval arm saw the urgent need for a weapons platform capable of withstanding heavy, sustained attack. Utilising a reinforced Type-9 chassis as a starting point, Lakon overhauled and geared every aspect of the design for combat, producing a military behemoth that could be produced in volume at short notice.

The hardpoints are not the same as previously thought, with 4 large, 4 small (not 1) and 1 medium (not 3) which lowers the calculated firepower factor to 18 (from 20) and with the core internals being identical to the Type-9, the FSD and power plant are the same. This is not-so-good news. It means this beasty will be armoured out the wazoo, but will fly like a whale and while it's firepower theoretically could match a cutter, it lacks the power systems to run many energy weapons, so this will rely on kinetic weapons to keep the hurt coming in combat.

Thanks to the description we know this will be the first Alliance ship in the game.

Strangely for this heavier (and lower jump range) variant of the Type-9, the cruise and boost speeds are higher! Does this mean the ship will be more agile than the Type-9? Maybe. But unless it is impossibly agile, then this ship is going to rely heavily on turrets and the deployed SLF.

It won't outrun a Thargoid (or anything else for that matter) but it will probably take extreme amounts of punishment and still limp away.

As long as the power-plant will take it, Class 8 shields plus all that armour will make it THE in-game ship-tank. People are going to have a lot of fun in outfitting with this one.

What we (think we) know so far…

The Type-10 Defender is a Lakon ship and a variant of the Type-9 Heavy transport ship. We’ve seen clips of the ship in Frontier's Beyond teaser video and it has a lot more engine power on display than it’s stable-mate.

Recently a CMDR anonymously posted game-data mined from Elite: Dangerous that reveals yet more details of this as-yet-unreleased ship. The data gives us a wealth of information about the ship and it’s place in the game.

Stuff we didn’t know

The ship designation in the game code is “TYPE-9_MILITARY/FORC_FDEV_V_MAMMOTH”

The internals are as follows: -

• Class 8 Power plant (Class 6 on the Type 9)
• Class 7 Thrusters (same as Type 9)
• Class 7 Frame Shift Drive (Class 6 on Type 9)
• Class 5 Life Support (same as Type 9)
• Class 6 Power Distributor (same as Type 9)
• Class 4 Sensors (same as Type 9)
• Class 6 Fuel tank (same as Type 9)

UPDATED thanks to Reddit for spotting my error - I had compared to Type-7 (I think) - I plead old age!

The Class 8 power plant puts the T10 right up there with the Cutter, Corvette and Anaconda. The Class 6 power distributor, same as the Type-9, seems a little low, but this ship doesn’t have any Huge hard-points, so maybe a Class 7 wasn’t required - either that or they are trying to limit the ship to kinetic weapons only which draw less power. The Class 7 FSD is a winner for sure, as only the Cutter and Beluga (the two largest ships in the game) have this size of Frame Shift and this vessel is smaller than a Type 9! That means this ship might have a reasonable jump range – especially for a combat class vessel that may have to ship out to Merope.

Nine Hardpoints

4 x Class 3 “Large”
3 x Class 2 “Medium”
2 x Class 1 “Small”

8 Utility slots (twice as many as the Type 9)

That gives this ship a firepower factor of 18 20 (Sum of Class x Qty) which makes it equal to an Imperial Cutter the ship with the most firepower in the game. Interestingly, all the AX weapons released so far are all Class 2, which means the Type-10 is not built as a weapons platform for those AX Multicannons and Missiles released already. Does this mean the ship will be putting Class 2 guns in Class 3 hard-points, or is there a bigger Class of AX weapons to come?

The hard-point names also indicate their position on the ship.

The two small hard-points are located front-left and front-right. Two of the medium hard-points are on the top-left and top-right of the ship. There are two large hard-points top-left and top-right and two large hard-points bottom-left and bottom-right. The final medium hard-point is mid-ship, but it's unclear if it is located top or bottom of the ship.

Layout of optional internals

1. Class 8
2. Class 7
3. Class 6
4. Class 5
5. Class 4
6. Class 4
7. Class 3
8. Class 3
9. Class 2
10. Military slot
11. Military slot

This gives us Class 8 shields in battle or 532T of cargo (256 + 128 + 64 + 32 + 16  + 16 + 8 + 8 + 4) which is unchanged from the Type-9 Heavy.

What else?

According to our anonymous source, the ship lists 53 different paint jobs. That's a lot of new looks to try out! Probably not all on sale on day one though.

The Type-10 has a Ship Launched Fighter Bay and crew positions for a pilot, as well as a second and third seat; meaning it's also a multi-crew ship.

Conclusion

This ship will be (as it's name suggests) a Mammoth! With the better thrusters and top-of-the-line FSD drive, it will be more than adequate to handle (although I doubt any will describe it as agile) and will have the jump range needed to get itself to the Thargoid war zones. With Imperial Cutter level firepower and a lower price-point this will be a popular ship. Being somewhere between the Anaconda (146M CR) and the Type 9 (76M CR) in price, I would speculate the cost of the new ship to be a little over 100M CR.
Sadly the Class 6 power distributor is a bit of an Achilles heel; all that Class 8 power and no way to pipe it out! The Class 7 Thrusters mean this ship is going to be a whale to handle. While slightly smaller than the Type-9, it will be heavier with armour, so don't expect to run rings around anyone.
This looks to be a slow-moving multi-cannon gun platform.