Cliffski's Blog has details on a new patch for Gratuitous Space Battles that owners of Positech's space strategy game should expect automatically soon, if they have not received it already. Says Cliff: "Campaign news to come soon. I needed to get this patch out there and live first." The new version 1.48 has both bug-fixes and balance tweaks, which are outlined in the patch notes, which follow.

version 1.48

1. Performance: Major rewrite of tons of areas to reduce memory usage and squash lots of small memory leaks.
2. Bug fix: Tractor beam turrets are no longer drawn when a ship should appear cloaked.
3. Bug Fix: Limpet launchers and Plasmas are now fired from the correct position when placed in multiple-hardpoint slots.
4. Bug Fix: Fixed a few minor miscalculations that meant ship damage looked (purely visually) like it was being repaired faster than it actually was, especially when cloaked.
5. Bug Fix: When you leave the ship design screen, any open module stat comparison windows are now closed.
6. Some playbalance tweaks
7. Bug Fix: Imperial fighters with tiny engine glows (also a nomad fighter) now no longer get drawn when the parent ship is docked at a carrier.

The balance stuff:

nomads:

• Awazem loses its cost boost, gets 8% armour boost
• Duwasir loses its armour boost, gets 10% speed boost
• Majali reduces speed penalty from 22% to 12%
• Abbadi gets an 8% armour boost
• Nomadic dogfight laser damage increased to 8
• Nomadic beam laser power usage reduced to 13

general:

• guidance scrambler beam weight increased to 147
• EMP Shield ecm strength increased from 66 to 82
• All frigate armour maxdamageabsorbable increased by 20%
• EMP Missile launchers, (both types) missile speed 25% faster. fireinterval reduced 10%, ecm strength increased 10%
• Decoy missile launcher weight reduced to 70

order:

• Limpet launcher limpetweight increased to 8.2, cost reduced to 110