 This is Witchbase news for Friday the 10th of March 2023 I'm CMDR Buur In Elite Dangerous news this week there's an ED James Bond style spoof launching tomorrow Elite Dangerous developer Darren Hallil moves on to new adventures and did we get a glimpse of the object at the center of the maelstrom If you enjoy our videos be sure to subscribe and click the little bell to be certain you see all our Elite Dangerous content and community posts here on YouTube and if you want to directly support our work by joining our Patreon you'll find links to that and everything else below We start this week with news that the latest James Bond style epic from CMDR Spatula 007 entitled Dangers Finger is set to premiere on Saturday March the 11th at 1800 hours UTC There's a full trailer for the 27 minute epic spoof comedy movie which will feature explosions car chases fistfights and some amazing celebrity voice impersonations all set to an equally impressive score from the Elite Dangerous community's own mohecon musical maestro CMDR Takoso to view the trailer and get a notification for the YouTube premiere of the movie you'll find a link in the description below this video Deran Halil senior game designer and one of the architects of the systems driving the Thargoid war as well as being a popular live stream semi-regular for Frontier announced this week that after seven years of working on Elite Dangerous he is moving on in his seven years at Frontier and on Elite Dangerous Deran has touched almost every system in the game and has become a regular feature in the social media of anyone watching and following all things Elite Dangerous often plying those feeds with cryptic encoded messages and inferences he's also become a regular cheeky lurker in the chat windows of many streamers and YouTubers whilst he's moving away from Elite it's fantastic to hear that he will be staying at Frontier working instead on other projects within the Cambridge Development House seven years is a huge amount of time to be working in the games industry on one property and we look forward to hearing about what he's next directed his talents into away from Thargoids and spaceships oh seven Deran and genuine huge heartfelt thanks for everything from myself Rene and everyone here at the Burpit Elite is quite often a game of smoke and mirrors and more than a little tin foil that is doubly true when it comes to all things Thargoid in nature predominantly because so little is actually really known about our slightly killy galactic neighbors what's at the center of the Thargoid maelstrom clouds is for obvious reasons one of the hotter subjects in the elitosphere currently and that inherent curiosity that we feel when trying to peer at what is hidden is compounded when there's something in this case the Thargoids actually trying to stop you seeing there are a number of obstacles currently that prevent players from peering directly into the heart of a maelstrom and slowly but surely we are starting to overcome them most notably just getting past the Thargoids themselves is challenging players are hit with high predictions and multiple interdictions just on the approach to the caustic clouds once inside you'll find caustic cloud generators dotted and roaming throughout the cloud which act almost like anti-ship mines producing huge caustic laden explosions next there are patrolling Thargoid vessels themselves running cautious and cold with some engineering can help deal with those threats if not largely negate them completely the environmental caustic damage coming from the clouds is pretty horrific but hull reinforcements of varying types and flavors can assist with that adding at least some longevity to your stay in the cloud and finally most recently there are caustic sink modules that can now be used when it comes to hanging around in the clouds these can be a complete game changer whilst you still can't stay forever given the weight and volume of caustic damage being dealt the sink modules do definitely make your stay longer and likely much more survivable once you approach the center of the cloud however it's here that we're subjected to the next layer of Thargoid defense whilst you're still subjected to huge amounts of caustic damage watching for patrols and avoiding mines get too close and you are hit with a colossal electromagnetic pulse that damages your hull temporarily knocks the entire ship offline and sends you spinning through the cloud out of control the effect only lasts a few seconds but it is hugely disorientating and of course it prevents you getting any closer to the heart of the cloud and seeing what's there with the advent of the caustic sink module however and the extra layer of survivability we now have it means that commanders are getting more of a look at the EMPulse itself and importantly the area that it's emanating from it's at this point that I need to underline that humans are creatures of pattern recognition and when staring up at clouds in the sky you'll always see shapes reminiscent of telephones cats double decker buses or pots of tea if you look hard enough and honestly we went back and forth this week over whether we should report what we think we've been seeing in the maelstroms for that very reason however ultimately our job here is to bring you the elite dangerous news be it tin foil or not and let you decide if it's valuable and we'd love to see more commanders equip a ship head into the maelstroms and report back on what they find we noticed in a video posted by commander radium io to discord that at the very moment the pulse fires there appeared to be what looked like a silhouette reminiscent of a gigantic thargoid vessel with the pulse emanating from the very center of the petals upon seeing the video we immediately headed into a maelstrom ourselves and triggered the pulse and when we did this is what we saw from the cockpit at the point of the pulse there does indeed appear to be thargoid like petal shapes in the central cloud what you're seeing now is slow-mo footage from rene's external camera during one of several passes at the pulse that we made from varying angles of attack just to be a hundred percent clear here i don't think right now that frontier has a huge thargoid model sitting at the center of the cloud and we just can't see it properly yet because of all the effects around it what i do think is there is a huge nebulous blobby shape that is deliberately very hard for us to decipher and within that blobby shape frontier's developers are perhaps trying to infer a huge thargoid vessel of some sort the obvious go-to for that vessel in established elite law is a thargoid hive ship if indeed that is the case it's likely that some caustic damage and a few patrolling interceptors will be the least of our concerns have you ventured into the maelstroms yet if you have did you manage to set off the em pulse and just what do you see in the clouds at the center of the caustic mess 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 oh seven 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