New ship. A detailed render replaces the stylized blue hull — in the game, in the hangar, on the ship overview and on the loadout screen.
Three things were needed to make it work:
A dedicated file for the ship’s lights. A second layer sits over the ship in additive blend mode. On the old, evenly blue-lit ship, the same source image worked fine for this too — the dark hull added almost nothing. A gray hull adds gray everywhere, which made the ship look washed out. Measured: 75% of its pixels fell between brightness values of 32 and 127. There’s now a separate lights-only image containing just the brightest few percent of the ship (5.4% of the surface): light strips and engine glow.
Cache-busting for the images. The ship images are embedded directly outside the usual script loader that handles cache versioning for everything else. Without a version tag, browsers kept showing the old ship after the new artwork shipped. The release process now updates these image versions too on every release.
The ship-import tool now supports three modes. One takes the source image as-is when it already carries transparency in its alpha channel (the correct way to do it), one floods in from the image edges to cut out a black background, and the old brightness-threshold method stays as a fallback. Edge-flood cutting is new and necessary, because a pure brightness threshold eats away half of a gray hull. The tool now writes all three output sizes at once.
The source template images stay in the project and no longer ship with the website itself.