 This is Witspace news for Friday the 19th of February 2024, I'm CMDR Buur. In Elite Dangerous News this week, Ram Tarr drops a surprise partial solution to the Titan anti-Guardian field, some in-depth supercruise overcharge community analysis has taken place and are the lights being turned off at Galnet again? You know how this bit goes, please like, subscribe and ding that little bell so that YouTube shows you all our content and if you'd like to directly help our work here at The Burpit you can also support us through Patreon, links to that and everything else are in the description below. The Titan Euer has been completely stripped of supporting systems by a concerted community effort after it pulled a surprise gaggle of authorised interceptors out of its hat a couple of weeks back. As a result, as of this recording, its in-game defence level is shown as completely vulnerable, it is under sustained Nanite torpedo attack right now and its hearts are dropping like a box of bricks out of a plane. If you are looking to collect your Titan decals and ship kits etc do not wait to get your 2 million credits worth of damage to its thermal core, we do not expect the beleaguered Titan to last into Saturday UTC. Likewise if you haven't yet seen a Titan explode or your fancy catching another one it is happening this weekend probably on Saturday night. If you want to track the damage to the Titan while you are away from the game we've linked to the excellent DCOH tracking website below. And those hearts are set to take different if not more damage from here on, as we were going to press today the in-game inbox was hit with a message from the pilots federation noting that the engineer Ram-Tar in the mean system has found a way to protect guardian weapons from the anti-guardian fields that emanate from thargoid titans. The message specifically states that once the weapons are shielded they can be used against all thargoid threats including titans. As of this recording there doesn't seem to be a solution to any other guardian modules beyond weapons but honestly Oya isn't going to live long enough to share an opinion on that at this point. We're assuming that the protection extends to AX operations in HIP 22460 as well where this horror story all started but we've no specific science to back that up currently. The hybrid SCO frame shift drive a blending of human and thargoid technology that was released into the commander sphere a couple of weeks back has been subjected to some significant testing and analysis this last week while the player base attempts to ascertain exactly what the perfect use case scenario for the module is. In case you missed it the drives feature what essentially equates to a boost button in supercruise that accelerates the user to thousands of times the speed of light in the matter of just a few seconds. The downsides to the drive other than it's only available in grade C and it can't be engineered are that it generates huge amounts of heat. It absolutely chews through fuel at an alarming rate while it's boosting and the resultant ride from using the boost feels something akin to an interdiction tether. Kind of like wrestling with a large live salmon while you've got olive oil soaked hands. When oddity did surface this week in relation to frame rates and heat generation in the module it appears the module generates a lower heat signature if the PC running the game has a lower frame rate but generally speaking with the use of heat sinks coupled with the rate that the drive chews through fuel which is by far its major limiting factor in normal gameplay this bug is unlikely to impact anything of any significant consequence. Whilst we've seen opinions on the usefulness of the SCO drives admittedly unusual abilities swerve in exactly the directions you might expect there's also been some serious attempts to pin down the drives performance high points and best case use scenarios. I myself have been using a completely unengineered python this week packed with fuel tanks, heat sinks, collection limpets and an SCO drive to farm some high grade emission POIs for an engineering project I'm working on at the moment. It's absolutely perfect for reaching those signals really deep in the system that are about to expire. I wouldn't have had a hope of reaching those signals before the SCO drive and honestly the brief rides in the supercruise equivalent of white water rapids in between signals are really good fun. Commander Alec Turner recommended a superb forum post based analysis of SCO fuel per hour and speed rates across all of elite ships created by commander Oscileron which you'll find linked below it comes complete with a google sheet listing all the numbers involved and there's a very competent review of the SCO drive by youtube channel dry heat and sand that balances the drives performance intra system as well as inter system one quite clearly being way more useful than the other that video also offering up some usage scenarios at the end. Ultimately the overall picture that we're getting here is that the drive is very useful currently at least in specific scenarios but not well placed outside of those scenarios a bit like trying to build a barn with a watermelon instead of a hammer. It can't be a coincidence that the drives arrival in the game coincides quite nicely with the community bearing down on those thargoid titans that are placed much deeper into the systems that they inhabit and that usage in those environments might help negate at least some of the many interdictions that come with travelling in thargoid controlled space. The in game galnet news service has seen a shift in its cadence of late that is starting to gain the attention of the community as a result rather bizarrely I have to report that this week it may or may not have been updated with a short piece acknowledging the distribution of the new achilles aerospace frame shift drive I'm not being deliberately facetious in my uncertainty there unless you're specifically watching galnet like a hawk these days it is genuinely quite hard to tell. The cadence of updates to the news network has changed significantly in recent times to the point where you could happily park a beluga lengthways in between them and the dates printed on the top of those updates rarely seem to relate to the date the item is actually published and sometimes differ depending on where you look at them. This in point the in game version of the story I'm speaking of specifically here is dated the 8th of April that's 11 days ago as I speak these words it doesn't yet appear on the front and centre web version of galnet news at elitedangerous.com. Commander Gravitas deficiency made us aware that it does appear on the older and as best as I can determine no longer officially in use pages at community.elitedangerous.com from frontier but there it's dated the 10th of April we're guessing all of this is symptomatic of the entire writing staff having left frontier around the start of the year when redundancies were sweeping the company. As a side note to that fdev started recruiting again this week for some of the other roles that they let go just two months ago and if you're keeping half an eye on frontiers back and forth in the gaming press this week then you will have seen the understandable backlash that is causing them. As far as galnet is concerned the cadence and indeed quality shift that the service has seen of late is quite palpable there are significantly fewer articles on the feed these days sometimes there can be a week or two between updates whereas we had become used to two or three updates a week at least. It's possible that what we're seeing here is simply just another symptom of fdev's well documented financial woes and the elite project having no writing staff as a result. But we have been pondering here if indeed this is an all part of a larger plan the company has in mind for elite in the future. Historically the game has always generated its own background simulation, event and numbers driven local pseudo news feed that is viewable in every station and starport in the galaxy. The feed which is viewable in station services will tell you what and how many ships have been through the system recently, the status and major events related to the factions present in the system as well as details of any player bounties local to the system and a report on any power play movements. It's all very dry and very clinical however lacking as it does any human touch. There are no unnecessary words, no colour to the stats presented and no greater context is offered with it. However the system was implemented around a decade ago and since that time technology has evolved in some quarters that evolution is happening at a rather terrifying pace. The video card giant Nvidia for example is now a world leader when it comes to implementing genuine AI into a game space to the point where they are now worth trillions of dollars. The world's stock markets are always on the lookout for the next big thing and AI is currently the recipient of that particular money hose. Frontiers boardroom have mentioned on one of their publicly broadcast earnings calls before that they are actively looking at how AI could be leveraged to benefit their business as are I'd imagine all the major publishers and developers. Elite Dangerous has always been a very statistic and event driven environment. It generates huge amounts of data on a daily basis covering player movements, changes in the BGS and the rise and fall of economies etc. So the political back and forth of power play are ultimately all numbers and event driven. It doesn't strike me then as a huge leap to wonder if perhaps a chat GPT like system couldn't be plugged into the data stream generated by the game and in particular the new power play 2.0 and then leveraged to interpret and display that stream with a somewhat more human like slant to it. In an attempt at least to supplement, if not replaced completely, the frankly irreplaceable the biological neuron driven feed from the previous generation of Galnet. Are you planning on wailing on the Titan Oya before it's too late? Will you be protecting your stock of Guardian weaponry and just what do you think is happening to Galnet? Let us know in the comments below. That's it for now, thanks very much for watching, we'll be back later this week with more videos, until then O7 commanders follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack, we very much look forward to seeing you next time.