 This weekend, as I type these words, the Elite Dangerous Community bore witness to a genuinely historic event in the game, the beginning of the end of the second Thargoid War and forever hereafter commanders will ask each other, were you there for the Taranus event? What follows is the story of what happened in Hayedi Sector FB-NB7-6 this week and what comes next. The deployment of update 18 to the game early last week brought with it a new weapon to use in the fight against the Thargoids, the Guardian Nanite Torpedo. When used against the thermal vents on the upper surface of a Thargoid Titan mother ship, the weapon prevents the colossal living starship from venting its excess heat into space. When this happens, the ship initiates an emergency venting system and its vulnerable thermal core is exposed to space on the underside of the ship. Once exposed, this thermal core can for a short time at least be attacked with more conventional AX weapons. Once the emergency vent has succeeded, the core is retracted and the cycle then repeats. The thermal core has 8 layers or hearts and each one of these hearts has to be taken down in turn via a gigantic community wide effort. Through the week, as damage was being done to the hearts, Frontier issued a call to arms encouraging commanders to focus their efforts on the weakest of the Titans, Taranus. And they also began periodically reporting on social media how many hearts were left. The galaxy map in game also presented a real time graphic in its Thargoid war map filter that showed the status of the ongoing assault. As we reported last week following the server tick on Thursday, the attack's progress did slow somewhat as Taranus had taken control of another system in its sphere of influence upping the level of defence the beast was able to field but, undaunted, the community continued the assault. Frontier announced late last week that both caustic sinks and Thargoid pulse neutralizers had had the material gathering requirement for their acquisition removed and they also announced that glaives were no longer interdicting commanders on their way to the titan further opening the door to mass community engagement in the event. And as the weekend arrived and commanders were better able to focus their efforts, the hearts began to fall like a deck of cards. Shortly before 1900 hours UTC on Friday the final heart of the titan Taranus was destroyed and this is what happened. Shortly afterwards it was being reported in game and on social media channels that the Thargoid titan that was the first to arrive in the bubble over a year and a half ago bringing with it so much toil and devastation Taranus had entered a state of meltdown and would experience complete structural failure in 24 hours. Following the announcement Frontier began encouraging commanders to flock to Taranus to witness the final fall of the monstrous titan at 1855 UTC on Saturday 2 March. Getting to Taranus was still no trivial matter, whilst the glaive interdictions had been removed regular Thargoid interdictions were still happening and there were still swarming Thargoids of all shapes circling their dying mothership but if you sat in the asteroid field and generally didn't draw attention to yourself you could sit and watch what happened next. The countdown reached its conclusion and at 1855 UTC on Saturday right on cue this is what happened. The initial blast from Taranus flung the onlookers backwards at 5000m per second rapidly exiting them from the caustic cloud surrounding Taranus. Once we regained control of our ship we were 185km from the titan as we witnessed the secondary smaller explosions emanating from the cloud which then culminated in the gigantic primary explosion that signalled the final death of Taranus. Right now what is left of Taranus has an appearance somewhat akin to that of a small star. It's surrounded by an incredibly dense caustic cloud a cloud so dense that it can't currently be penetrated by a ship even when using caustic sinks they simply fill up too quickly. Frontier have let it be known on twitter and on the forums that there may be something to explore in the cloud when it eventually dissipates in a few weeks. It's extremely difficult to sum up adequately what it was like being involved in the events around Taranus this weekend. In my long years as a gamer I have never experienced anything like the Taranus assault and resultant explosion. When it comes to the finale moment itself to achieve that level of engagement, immersion and pure theatre in a video game is no small thing. To achieve it in a multiplayer game set in a 1 to 1 scale recreation of the Milky Way galaxy is an entirely different thing and this was remember no cutscene or pre-rendered video this was happening in-game completely live for thousands of players all at the same time. My hat is off to you Frontier that was nothing short of jaw dropping. If you missed the Taranus event then there are still 7 titans threatening the bubble and the community has already turned it's eye toward the Titan Leigh Gong in HIP 8887. I'd urge you to make every effort to be present for at least one of the future crescendo moments. It's quite the thing to experience first hand. Will you be attacking the titans in the next act of the war? Were you present for the assault last week and did you witness first hand the explosion of the Titan Taranus? Let us know in the comments below. If you've enjoyed this video be sure to like and subscribe so youtube shows you all our content and if you'd like to support our work here at the burp it you can also join us on patreon links to that and everything we've talked about in this video you'll find linked below. That's it for now thanks very much for watching we very much look forward to seeing you next time.