We are very pleased to announce the release of a very large feature for
Lusternia: Aetherships! We've been working behind the scenes on this for
over three months (well, really, Roark has been so be sure to thank
him), and from our preliminary tests (i.e., the gods playing around in
ships on a test server) we think aetherships are a very unique and fun
new feature. Obviously, with such a big release, there are bound to be
bugs so please be sure to use the BUG command and _thoroughly_ tell us
in detail what the problem is. This is, frankly, the largest feature
we've released yet from a design and coding standpoint.

The rough design for aetherships was written over a year ago (yes,
before Lusternia's release), as I had always wanted a decent ship
system. You may recall that in the past I've vaguely hinted that there
was more in store for aethermanses, which is why I always turned down
requests for such things as newsrooms or anything that could conceivably
interfere with turning an aethermanse into aethership?

With Lusternia's focus on planar systems, it seemed the logical step to
have ships that traveled through the planar aetherways. The next phase
of design focused on how ships should operate, and the key here is
having a decent crew. In other words, you will find that ship combat can
only work efficiently with an experienced crew.

The Aethercraft skill should _not_ be a priority for most people. As
such, you will notice you can't even learn the skill unless you explicitly
select it with SKILLCHOICE. You will then receive a warning that the
abilities in the skillset are unusable unless you own a ship or know
someone who owns one and is willing to explicitly grant you permission
to be on the crew of his or her ship (i.e., given you MODULE permission).
Again, please don't encourage others to learn Aethercraft before, for
example, guild skills.

One thing you will note is that there are 3 specializations planned
which have not been released. That is because they have not yet been
fully designed! We want you to get a little more experience under your
belt to see what aetherships are like, then we'll ask you on the forums
for some feedback on what you may like to see for these specializations.
The specializations will be Commander (all command chair operations),
Empath (all empathic grid operations which include repairing the ship
and communications), and Combateer (all battle turret functions).

Enjoy!


Penned by My hand on the 22nd of Avechary, in the year 139 CE.