Cits and Civs, Captains and Commanders, you’re tuned to episode 538 of Guard Frequency — the best damn space game podcast ever! This episode was recorded on Friday, January 16 and released for streaming and download on Tuesday, January 20, 2026 at GuardFrequency.com
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This Week’s Schedule
- Flight Deck
- Elite: Dangerous
- Star Citizen
- Helldivers 2
- Guard Frequency Exiles, where the crew needs a new hobby that doesn’t involve larceny or assault.
- Feedback Loop
Links & The Like
Elite: Dangerous
Elite Dangerous released its half-year earnings report and they are swimming in guineaquids and expect to make even more over the next six months. And we finally have some concrete numbers to share about Elite Dangerous. Looking at two powerpoint slides and doing basic arithmetic tells us that Elite took in just over 3.5 million guineaquids from May to November of 2025. This does not include the release of the Caspian Explorer which went on sale in December. It’s not a huge part of FDev’s portfolio, but it is more than F1 Manager did, and is roughly half the size of Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster. Not bad for an 11-year old game.
Star Citizen
Star Citizen released Early Access Pre-Alpha Release Candidate Prototype Experimental Test Build 4.6.0 PTU 11070272 to the PTU server. It’s time to clear the air! At least that’s the title of the newest combat mission chain that, as of last week, a player would need to complete 25 times to get the big prize at the end. And the big prize is another mission! And if you complete another 25 mission, you get another mission! But don’t worry, players who don’t want to grind out 50 combat missions will be able to grind out 25 hauling missions instead. And that’s probably not a great idea because folks are still losing inventory completely at random. In the meantime, the Squadron 42 flight model is all the way totally done and it will only be months or years until that gets ported over to Star Citizen.
Helldivers 2
Helldivers 2 announced the next warbond – The Redacted Regiment – focusing on stealth gameplay. After setting a January 20 release date, they delayed the update indefinitely due to unspecified quality issues. This may be an improvement over Arrowhead’s usual practice of discovering game-killing bugs after release.
Community Questions
- How much grind is acceptable to put in front of new content, if ANY?
- Are you responsible for any of the guineaquids that Frontier bragged about? Will the new Operations feature get your wallet open?
Patreon Backing
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Join Us In Game!
- Click here to go to our Star Citizen Organization page and apply today!
- Check out the callsigns we use personally in each game
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