Ships on Big Bang Smugglers

Ships

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The shape of the catalog

45 purchasable hulls, plus the SS Starter you can’t buy, plus six epic hulls you can only earn.

The 45 are three archetypes × three lines × five tiers. Every one of the 45 has a provably unique stat block — that is enforced by an automated test, not a convention.

The three archetypes

Archetype	Holds	Combat	Hull multiplier
Trading	Deepest	Weakest	×0.80
War	Shallowest	Heaviest	×1.25
Balanced	Middle	Middle	×1.00

The three lines

Line	Roles	Doctrine
Neutral spine	trading, war, balanced	The baseline. No faction, no lock, no bonus. Stocked everywhere.
Federation	patrol, enforcer, dreadnought	+10% base shields at every tier.
Pirate	smuggling, raider, corsair	+0.10 escape over the Federation mirror, plus hidden holds.

Federation and Pirate hulls are mirror images: same holds, same fighters, same torpedoes, same hull. The line decides what they do better.

v2.0.4 — The Galaxy Comes Alive

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Day two of launch week, and the galaxy just got a lot louder.

The Feed Tells the Story

Until today, the galaxy feed only carried system notices — battles, land grabs, and arrivals were happening all around you, invisibly. No more:

Battle reports. Every PvP engagement now posts publicly — “X destroyed Y in sector N,” or drove them off, or watched them run. The ⚔️ combat lane from v1 is back.
Ship commissionings. When a captain commissions a tier-3+ hull, the galaxy hears about it.
Land and war. Planet claims, port captures, and ports shaking off their occupiers all post publicly now — several of these were being written with your name on them and delivered to no one.
New captains and season honors appear for everyone, and feed entries carry proper categories again.

Every Ship Is Now Its Own Ship

A sharp-eyed captain noticed two ship classes with identical stats. The audit found it ran deeper: the Federation line was a stat-for-stat clone of the neutral line. As of today:

v2.0.2 / v2.0.3 — Launch Weekend Fixes

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first weekend of 2.0 brought real players, and real players find real bugs. Two patches went out in response — thank you to the captains who filed reports. You know who you are, and soon the galaxy will too.

v2.0.2

Defense contracts now mean it. A purchased contract grants full combat immunity for its window — NPC pirate and patrol ambushes are suppressed, not just player attacks. If you bought two hours of peace to trade, you get two hours of peace.
Honest trade numbers. Your cargo now tracks what you actually paid for it (weighted average, taxes and fees included), so sell screens report true profit — including negative profit when you dump at a loss. Fee and tax estimates now come from the live market instead of guesses.
The feed tells the story. Combat outcomes, port and planet captures, arrests at dock, and more now appear with real names and details in the galaxy feed and the “while you were away” recap, instead of generic labels.
Fixed a crash when expanding Recent Sectors, and added an app-wide safety net so a single broken screen can no longer blank the whole app.

v2.0.3

Ship tiers display correctly. Owned ships showed “Tier 1” no matter the hull — and that phantom tier was blocking warp drive installation on tier-2+ ships. Your Tristar Hauler is, and always was, Tier 3; now the game admits it.
Fixed a crash when engaging an enemy from the sector view.
Engage intel is real. Enemy fighters, shields, and torpedoes now show actual values in the engage dialog (win estimates were being computed from zeroed stats).
New: the Hull Whisperer insignia — a season honor granted by the GM to players whose bug reports shaped the season. It burns with the season, like all insignia. Earn it the hard way: break our game and tell us how.

Android: version 2.0.3 is rolling out on Google Play. Web players at play.bigbangsmugglers.com are already on it.

v1.19.0 — Fleets, Garages, and Ship Destruction

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

v1.19.0 is a major systems release focused on making ship ownership, corporation coordination, and combat consequences much deeper.

This update adds ship destruction with escape-pod recovery, multi-ship ownership with garage and Starbase storage, corporation fleets and shared fleet rewards, private corporation chat, Tesseract Drive travel, stronger planet export income, and a long set of combat and interface fixes.

Ship Destruction and Escape-Pod Recovery

Ships can now be destroyed instead of lingering in a repairable zero-state, and depleted defenses warn you before you cross that line.

v1.14.4 -- Combat, Intel, and Sector Stability

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:01:00 -0400

v1.14.4 is a bugfix release focused on keeping moment-to-moment sector play cleaner and more predictable.

This update fixes sector traffic clustering, duplicate pirate encounters after wins, overlapping combat result screens, broken Sector Intelligence reveals, missing Federation reputation gains, stat cap mismatches in the shipyard, and missing player and ship detail in sector presence displays.

Sector Traffic Cleanup

Federation patrol ships now distribute correctly instead of crowding into a single sector.

v1.10.2 — Combat Stat Fix

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:00:35 -0400

v1.10.2 is a targeted combat fix.

This update corrects a bug where significant stat advantages were not carrying their expected weight in battle. Ships with heavy shields or large combat power leads were still suffering total defeats against much weaker opponents — an outcome that should have been rare but was happening too often.

Combat Outcomes Now Reflect Stat Gaps

The core issue: shields were providing little to no actual damage mitigation, and attrition losses were not scaling with the actual gap between combatants.

v1.5.1 — Bridge Tab Polish

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0000

v1.5.1 is a polish pass on the Bridge tab and a fix for warp drive route calculation hanging on long distances.

Warp Drive Route Fix

Calculating a warp route was timing out for long distances. The pathfinding was making a separate database read for every sector it explored — in a large galaxy that’s hundreds of sequential round trips, easily pushing past the timeout limit. The fix loads all sector connections in a single batch query and runs the pathfinding entirely in memory. Warp route previews and navigation should now be instant regardless of distance.

Combat System Highlights: v1.2.6 through v1.4.3

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:00:00 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks, combat has seen the most significant overhaul in Big Bang Smugglers history. This is a quick summary of what changed and why.

Shields Are Now the Only Thing You Repair

Before v1.4.0, repair was a blurry concept. The starport would try to restore fighters, torpedoes, and shields all at once, but the math was inconsistent and the display was confusing. More importantly, it didn’t make a lot of thematic sense — you don’t “repair” bullets.

v1.4.0 — Combat Overhaul

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:00:00 +0000

v1.4.0 is a significant overhaul of the combat system and how you manage your ship’s weapons and defenses.

Attack vs Defense

Combat power is now split into separate attack and defense calculations.

Shields are pure defense. They have no effect on your attack power — only on how hard you are to damage or disable.

Fighters are pure attack. They deal damage but contribute nothing to your defense.

Torpedoes are pure attack with a heavier punch than fighters. One torpedo is worth roughly 2.5 fighters in attack power, but costs twice as much to purchase.

v1.2.8 — Ship Purchase Fix

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Version 1.2.8 fixes a data integrity bug introduced when purchasing a new ship at a starport.

What Was Wrong

When you bought a new ship, the old ship was deleted and a new one created. The new ship was set up correctly, but your player account was not always updated to point at it. This left some players in a state where their account referenced a ship that no longer existed, which could break the ship screen, deployables, stealth scanning, and other features that depend on knowing your current ship.

v1.2.6 — Starport Polish & Ship Stats

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Version 1.2.6 is a polish pass on the starport and ship screen, fixing a cluster of display and behavior bugs reported by players.

Shipyard Overhaul

The shipyard now shows fighters, torpedoes, and cargo holds as separate cards, each with a consistent layout: your current count, the maximum you can reach with upgrades, and a buy button with the cost shown inline. If a stat is fully upgraded the buy button is replaced with a confirmation so you know you have hit the ceiling.

v1.2.3 — Bug Fixes

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:00:00 +0000

Version 1.2.3 is a follow-up to v1.2.1, which introduced several regressions that made it into the Play Store before they were caught. This release finishes what 1.2.1 started.

Combat Power

Your combat power was always displaying as 50 during NPC encounters regardless of your actual fighters, shields, and torpedoes. The screen data endpoint that powers the navigation screen was returning a stripped-down ship object that omitted combat stats entirely. It now returns the full stat set, so your displayed combat power reflects your actual ship.

v1.2.2 — Web and Screen Data Fixes

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Version 1.2.2 is a hotfix for regressions introduced in v1.2.1’s performance pass.

What Broke

The v1.2.1 performance update removed unnecessary authentication token refreshes from every cloud function call. During that cleanup, three composite data endpoints were accidentally rewired to call the wrong backend functions. Each one returned a different data shape than the screen expected, causing silent failures.

The navigation screen went blank. The starport showed “Unavailable.” The ship screen failed to load. All three issues had the same root cause.

v1.2.0 — Ship Class Overhaul and Upgrade Improvements

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Version 1.2.0 makes ship choice matter more.

Ship Class Identities

Previously all ship classes shared identical shield values at each tier, and the differences between a trading ship and a warship were easy to miss. That changes in 1.2.0.

Trading ships – the Nebula Merchant line and their Smuggling counterparts – now carry significantly more cargo and escape at 55%. They are not built for combat. Their advantage is in moving goods and getting out when things go wrong.