Hello. Hope everyone's summer off to a good start. We're still making good progress on BETA 8.

Adding Some Backstory

We're adding a bit of backstory to the game. For over a hundred years, the ancient jumpgate network has been used by humans and aliens alike to move about the galaxy. No one knows who built the gates and no one is really sure how they work. Then one day a month ago, they stopped working. This effectively severs parts of the galaxy away from each other, throwing it into regional shock. Now, some of the brighter scientists have discovered there is something stirring just beyond the gateways. Perhaps they are the cause of the disruption? Maybe they hold the key to re-establishing the network and resuming life as it was known? This is going hand-in-hand with the universe changes and how the network of jumpgates can be activated and used. Each gate, in a new universe, will be offline and require some work to re-activated and linked to its partner in another star system.
Lurking just beyond the dimensional cusp are a never before encountered type of beings, a parasitical race whose exact intentions aren't clear. But what is quickly discovered is they can be lured into normal space, and they hold the keys to the gates. Defeating, or making a deal with these beings, will be the difference between success and failure for you and all beings of the local star system. Don't worry though, each being will possess enough items to activate several gates so you need not do it for each gate (you can if you want), and the items will also be used in a number of distinct components. These encounters can be done alone or with friends present.

Other Changes

Additionally, following some good indepth feedback and some long internal debates, we'll be changing the "Lab" component to be named "Fabricator". The reason for this is feedback has repeatedly shown confusion over what is expected of this component type, and the slowly changing nature of the component since Prototype made it clear it was time to pick a name more suitable to its purpose.
We've also been doing some balance related thinking along with feedback mulling over and after some experimenting we're implementing "recovery". Recovery is the process of removing components from mounts that are not owned by, or directly accessible by you. Recovery has a chance of breaking the component, so give it an extra moment to consider what you want to do with wrecks or fresh battle-strewn chunks before you loot! If you really want something, it might be safer to drag it to a shipyard rather than just ripping it out then and there. Finally, we're still going over Manufacturing recipes (going hand-in-hand with the Fabricator change). Still a few weeks(tm) to go, but BETA 8 should be a real big update, possibly even bigger than BETA 1 was. We'll announce it when the Experimental build is ready right before the Pre-Release, so stay tuned.