If you’ve been looking for a mobile place to house your Elite Dangerous ships, the game’s upcoming Fleet Carriers have promised to allow exactly that. Today, Frontier has given us a whole bunch of new details on exactly how these massive ships will work when they land as part of the game’s big December update.
Fleet Carriers will be available to any Elite Dangerous player with “a large amount of credits” to spend, whether you’re playing the base game or Beyond, though each commander will only be able to purchase one. Fleet Carriers can support up to 16 player ships – with eight large, four medium, and four small landing pads – and you can set permissions which will allow other players to dock aboard your carrier.
You can use Fleet Carriers to rearm, refuel, and repair your ships, and a variety of loadouts will offer different services and modules to gear the carrier for different jobs. Frontier notes possible roles including: bounty hunter, mercenary, pirate, tradey, smuggler, miner, explorer, or search and rescue, so these massive vessels will have a variety of uses.
You’ll be able to schedule Fleet Carrier jumps from the galaxy map whenever you want and wherever you are, though it’ll take a still-unspecified unique resource to get underway. Carriers will have a 500 LY jump range per jump.
Check them out in the video above.
Fleet Carriers launch in the December update, but there’s plenty of stuff coming up a bit sooner in the September 17 release, including a new set of tutorial and a new currency system called Arx.