Eve Online offering free Christmas spaceships for all

On December 14th Eve pilots will get a very special gift from space-santa in the form of a brand spanking new Echelon class spaceship. Read on for an overview of the new vessel and information on how to retrieve the prize.

The new ship will be available to anyone who logs in between December 14th and January 3rd 2011, and can be applied to one character of your choosing. It won't work with trial accounts, however.

The Echelon is a Frigate class vessel that sounds as though it has some handy espionage abilities. here's how CCP describe the new vessel: "Constructed in secrecy, the Echelon is a minor masterpiece of engineering, integrating otherwise incomprehensible Sansha technology into a frigate-class capsuleers vessel. The advanced cryptographic processors on board provide superior hacking capabilities for use on most known password-secured devices. However, the true beauty of the Echelon is in the adaptive synchronization of capsuleers and Sansha codebreaking components, creating a system predicted to give capsuleers an edge over even the strongest of the Nation's encryption locks."

For details on how to claim your free ship come December 14th, check out the guide on the Eve Online site. Hopefully it'll have that lovely new spaceship smell.

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.