UPDATE 25th June 2018
With three days to go until the second Chapter of the Beyond updates will go live, Frontier have release a CGI trailer featuring the Krait (called it!) so here it is, the Krait Mk II.
While a variant ship, the Alliance Challenger - an armoured version of the Chieftain was "officially" announced, the release video teased a second ship.
The Frontier forums gave us the following details on Beyond Chapter 2: here
Beyond Chapter 2 Release Notes
New Ship: Challenger
The Alliance continue to refine their warships in the face of the looming Thargoid threat. The Alliance Challenger, envisaged as a frontline combat vessel, has stronger armour than its Chieftain counterpart and will be able to soak up a significant amount of punishment.
Wing Missions
First introduced in Chapter One of Beyond, we are introducing a Wing Mining Missions for you and your fellow Commanders to take on!
Installation Interactions
In a similar fashion to the Megaship interactions, which were introduced in Chapter One, Commanders will now be able to scan and interact with Space Installations.
- Scan – Scanning the installation will allow Commanders to see what they can interact with: Turrets, Comms Arrays and Cargo Bays.
- Turret hack – Disable turrets protecting other potential hackable points. This will deactivate security measures put in place to protect the Comms Arrays and Cargo Bays.
- Comms array – Get tradable data from the Comms Array.
- Cargo bay – Fire a limpet on the Cargo Bay to unlock and steal commodities and materials.
Tech Broker
Tech Brokers will allow commanders to unlock large weapons versions of the existing guardian tech weapons. These Tech Brokers will issue blueprint requests to collect Guardian data as well as materials and then, once delivered, will unlock certain Guardian modules of weapons for purchase. Will you turn you weapons on Thargoid or use them to pirate rival Commanders?
Thargoid
Thargoids continue to be an intergalactic menace! With the Alliance introducing a new ship, the Thargoids intend to up their game too, introducing new Scouts that will buff other Scouts and increase their combat efficiency.
As you can see in the trailer (above) the video shows the rather distinctive rear of the new Krait heavy fighter. Recognisable from the 3D render video teaser at Frontier Expo last October (here).
Since you don't spend a significant percentage of your teaser trailer showing the back-end of the Krait if you're not going to release it, then we have visual if not verbal confirmation that the Krait will be introduced to Elite at the end of the month.
Matching rears - the Krait
So what do we know about this new ship?
- It has a fighter bay.
- It has more than one crew position, so almost certainly supports multi-crew.
- Frontier stated at the Expo that the Krait was an Alliance ship.
- It only has two visible hard-points in the render, which appear to be huge (Class 4) which makes this ship a "Vulture XL" in many ways or a super-agile big brother to the likes of the Keelback.
- Based on sizes extrapolated from the the video render, based on the known sizes of cargo hatches & fighter bay doors, the ship is approximately 62m long x 62m wide, making it a medium sized ship a little larger than an Asp Scout.
Unless there's a Beta release of Beyond Chapter 2, which seems unlikely considering that we're less that four weeks from the release date, then the subject of ship cost and performance will have to wait until the end of this month to be answered. Expect a ship blueprint a few weeks after that! :)