what are the Maelstrom?

[Woakes]

Well, I managed to penetrate Taranis and then Taranis penetrated me back.


Flying my engineered adder, I could outrun most of the interdictions once back in normal space.
One failed interdiction pulled me out at the edge of the Maelstroms sphere of influence, so I was 950km away, and it looked about the same size as Barnardsloop.

I got bored and jumped back into supercruise and then jumping back out again.
This time 100 km out from the center.

The scanner starts losing track of where the center of the Maelstrom is, so you get disorientated. So the reticle keeps "searching" and moving around, so you get lost, Quickly.

I got hit twice by "something". The first took me down to 50, and the second blow destroyed my Adder.
It looks like there are floating mines inside, but those were pretty big, and i don't remember flying near something so I don't know what hit me. It could have been weaponfire.
But I was panic boosting so, I could have rammed something You are constantly being warned about the caustic damage, so it's a little hard to distinguish between "damage" and "that other damage". Adders have a faulty damage indicator, as soon as they activate, the ship just explodes....

Steam Community :: Screenshot

Steam Community: Elite Dangerous.

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The view from my Death cam where one of the structures can be seen.


I saw a caustic shard in my contact panels after the first impact. So I guess they could be scoopable and handed in, to somewhere / someone important? when FDEV starts leaving out those kinds of CG's. I don't know if thats what I smashed into, or if it was debris after the impact, or if it was one of those mines.

UPDATE:
ATTEMPT 2:
I made a second (failed) attempt to look inside of the Maelstrom.
The Maelstrom is approximately 100-120km in radius.

The crosses that one sees are in fact "Caustic Generators" according to your instruments.
And naturally, as you get closer your ship starts hemorrhaging hull integrity thanks to the caustic enzyme.
I think the generator lays out "caustic shards".
The generators move around by themselves as well, and I wound up crashing into one of the generators, making it explode, which then dropped off some materials "caustic deployment mechanism" (i can't remember and I took no screenshots as I was in a fluster)
There are intercepters floating around and are "maintaining" the caustic cloud.

 

[earth-traveller]

Those floating things are like mines.
Wen you come to close the first eject some green caustic gas... wen way to close they'll explode giving you a lot a damage... and wen you come to close to the Maelstrom center there is like a wave off don't know what... that will fling you wayyyy out giving you even more damage... for the moment it is impossible to get to the centre of Maelstrom... i am grinding already to collect the item the mines drop wen exploding.... my guess is will need it later.

 

[B1rdy]

The scanner starts losing track of where the center of the Maelstrom is, so you get disorientated. So the reticle keeps "searching" and moving around, so you get lost, Quickly.

This appears to me as we are missing some device to be able to pinpoint and actually reach the center. So we are basically locked out until FDevs flicks a switch and have only something nice to look at at the moment - hope I am wrong though.

 

[Woakes]

If Earth traveller is correct and the mines are pumping out caustic materials, then that might be the way to take down the maelstrom. I seriously suggest down out at the edge of the cloud.
I am kitting out my krait with a pulse wave scanner, just because i feel like it.

I guess we have to push back the advancing waves of thargoid.


According to Galnet, swarms if thargoids are coming out of it, so it’s either mobile station/ base/carrier with the caustic cloud as an outer defence, or it’s a hyperspace gateway to thargoid space.
An Omphalos rift, if you will.

 

[Woakes]

ATTEMPT 2:
I made a second (failed) attempt to look inside of the Maelstrom.
The Maelstrom is approximately 100-120km in radius.

The crosses that one sees are in fact "Caustic Generators" according to your instruments.
And naturally, as you get closer your ship starts hemorrhaging hull integrity thanks to the caustic enzyme.
I think the generator lays out "caustic shards".
The generators move around by themselves as well, and I wound up crashing into one of the generators, making it explode, which then dropped off some materials "caustic deployment mechanism" (i can't remember and I took no screenshots as I was in a fluster)

There are intercepters floating around that are "maintaining" the caustic cloud generators with green lightning.
One of which of course started to investigate my handiwork, by the time I noticed the critical level of my hull, and started to try to get out of there, it was too late, and I forgot how limpets needed to be targeting my own ship, so I died (again).

Guardian weapons were offline, naturally.

So it's the human AX weapons that need to be tested to see if they can bring down the caustic generators.

 

[Rock Hunter]

Those floating things are like mines.
Wen you come to close the first eject some green caustic gas... wen way to close they'll explode giving you a lot a damage... and wen you come to close to the Maelstrom center there is like a wave off don't know what... that will fling you wayyyy out giving you even more damage... for the moment it is impossible to get to the centre of Maelstrom... i am grinding already to collect the item the mines drop wen exploding.... my guess is will need it later.

I think I came across this earlier today. I’d been exploring inside the maelstrom and trying to get close to the generators without blowing myself up when there suddenly appeared to be a blueish/white ‘bubble’ expanding out towards and seemingly around me. Then as you say, was flung away to find myself at the edge of the maelstrom. I don’t know if that sounds like a good description to you, I was in VR at the time so there may be some variation in colour perception and general perspective.

Interestingly I also had the same experience as @Woakes - I was interdicted from SC just as I was about to drop from SC, so ended up around 150km from the maelstrom’s edge. I just boosted my way in taking the opportunity to look around but it did make me wonder if this is just coincidence or mechanic….though conclusions can‘t be drawn on two samples.

 

[Woakes]

I think dropping out “normally” gets you automatically to the 100/120km.

My bizarre interdiction put me 950km away. Right on the edge of a stellar body’s sphere of influence (when you share the same “instance” in the game as that body). When you go 1000km away you become separated and the stellar body flies away in its orbit.

But if you want a specific distance to the body, like I did dropping out at 300km, this can be orchestrated by supercruise super slow and at the desired “distance” you switch to your module panel and turn off your FSD. It dumps you out in normal space exactly when you want it too.
Turning off supercruise normally, allows the game to spawn you where it thinks you need to be.


Another little hack I brought to the party was the pulse wave scanner (used for mining).
It wasn’t overly useful by it still highlighted and reflected the caustic generators before they became decently visible, but I doubt it’s of any use to anyone.

 

[molgrips]

I'd like to see an effort to try and eradicate all the generators.

 

[Rock Hunter]

Ahhh, okay. I think it may have been a confused situation as I was nearing the maelstrom readying for coming out of SC when I was interdicted but then when I dropped there was no Thargoid anywhere near me. Perhaps the interdiction failed and I simply dropped where I was supposed to.

Neat trick with the FSD, something to add to my knowledge.

 

[cmdr milesred]

the blue is an emp
likely the Thargoid version
seems to have a range of something under 10km it just looks really big

most of the info here jives so far.
the corrosive shards aka launchers need to be blown up

seems to me it is very alive and moves very fast and is large

as the release went, the info given to us is the Taranus is 160km wide.

this fits nicely with what you see in the cloud.
the 'front' moves fast and seems to just rotate a lot, with its face/target/front whatever.. as the part we see moving.
stay at least 10km from that and getting closer is easy. EMP
the other stars in there only bother me if I go too fast, dumb thing to do if you can't see anyway.

strongly recommend the use of MA hull module if you want to last more than a few seconds.

so far, enjoyable.

 

[Guyperson]

Seems like they really don't want you getting close to their hive ships after the mycoid incident.

 

[Esteban]

If we estimate the radius of the maelstrom by halving an estimate of its diameter (from a distance) I'm still not sure we have a good idea of when we're approaching anything that could be called its center. We don't have a good measure of distance traversed once we're boosting furiously to get as far as we can inside the cloud. Then, once we get hit by a pulse, all bets are off without good equipment to measure distance.
Sounds like humanity needs to start deploying marker-beacons all around these clouds.

I have reached a blue region inside. I can't tell if it was an EMP or something else and I can't tell whether I was close to losing the ship coincidentally or if I was killed by it. I need more attempts to hope to figure that out. There's just a lot to monitor especially with the display tearing and all the fuss going on.

I have shot at the "new" ships we see inside the cloud numerous times. An explosion of some sort has resulted but I can't tell if I have done anything to (or destroyed) them because I lose track of where they were when they retaliate (or whatever happens) and I'm thrown. I have noted quite a number of Mats dropped when I have done this too but I'm not entirely sure if it was because of me or if that was a coincidence. *

I like the idea of a concerted effort by many pilots (with backups) to destroy the corrosive-cloud generators (those "new" ships we see inside). Could also just do a long line of ships pushing towards the 'center.' When one gets thrown, the next (not affected) becomes "point" and so on. Go go go!
These could be combined, of course. If you're thrown, you join the search & destroy crews going after those corrosive-cloud generators
That could be a fun session!

Scientists and manufacturers: heavy corrosion-resistant armor, please! This shouldn't be hard. Stainless steel and other alloys have been around for ages! Glass-coating of my ship, whatever! Let's do this!

* Incidentally, if you're hoping to collect these Mats, you'll essentially be required to use limpets. There's so much motion, instability-of-ship-control (both?) within the cloud that manual scooping is difficult and likely too time-consuming considering the limited time available to ships operating in there. I have done it but when the proverbial clock is ticking...

 

[He$$eeTant]

I salute your efforts and selfless destruction of your ships in the name of progress and war. o7 cmdrs

 

[molgrips]

Stainless steel and other alloys have been around for ages!

The caustic stuff isn't an acid, it's an enzyme of some kind that eats metal in a different way than we're used to.

 

[cmdr milesred]

so far its easy
rails remove the thorns(corrosive launchers) and the corrosive at the same time...
roll a bit to avoid their reactions to death.
it wasn't my plan to kill stuff in there, but they killed me twice first in my friendly little hauler.
stupid garden thorngoids.

 

[Angelpichu]

It looks like a giant rock in the middle of the storm. If you get close enough, it charges up, and emits pulses that shut down your systems and throw you back about 20 to 30km or more. Interesting to note is that Interceptors you sometimes see in the clouds are not hostile. At least, the one I saw wasn't, but it was facing away from me and I didn't think it wise to enter its line of sight.

In any case I think maybe we'll have to take back a certain number of systems under that maelstrom's control before we can get any closer to the giant rock.

 

[Bravo17]

PSA: Don't bother taking ANY Guardian Tech into the Maelstrom systems, they will last about a minute before they go down to 0% health and become useless.

 

[Woakes]

Regardless of where one is inside of the maelstrom, the maelstrom navigation point is ALWAYS 120km away. Add then that the generators appear to move and things get disorientated FAST.

I was saw this in an episode of Babylon 5, when it they were trying to find a lost ship in hyperspace. As John J Sheridan said, leave one fighter at the edge. And deploy the rest of the squadron, then a pilots then stop when they are about to loose contact with the previous ship, and so on with the rest of the wing, like a string of pearls. And Bruce Boxlietner is never wrong!

In our case it would have to be in 6km intervals at the edge of sensor range. That way you have a reference point to get “out” and get healed up along the way by your wing.

I might have to ditch my current efforts because I have only guardian AX tech, so I need to go do some grinding to pick up some human AX stuff.

I think a CG with the sole age of research and development into the caustic enzyme generation process, is the key to unlocking a decent hull upgrade. But when civilian Ram-tah and the “doctors/professor” (aka Fdev) decide it is story appropriate to do so.

The design of the generators does remind me of something else from another space sim,

Gunstars & Interceptors - Independence War II - Edge of Chaos - Community

Maps, Missions and Patches for the I-War games

www.i-war2.com

 

[cmdr milesred]

not so much
I often get up to 7 to 10km from it

no getting lost either it is close enough to the main star that you can easily see the way out
so far there are
Thargoid Corrosive launching thorny goid
it fires a pulse and a few corrosive device that looks a bit like a heatsink
corrosive mechanism
if this breaks and you get
caustic shards
corrosive crystals
or doesn't break and you get corrosive mechanism

upgraded from hauler, to courier, to krait, to conda.
conda has great hull to start, with some MA Hull it lasts quite awhile and the rails being used a lot, removes any caustic quickly.
getting lots of new mats anyway and more than the usual grumbles from whatever it is...maybe it'll come out soon enough..

p.s. I wanted to add, it looks like the big heart shaped furry monster from bugs bunny.
as such, it seems to be flowing from the head mostly(the top of the heart shape), the smog..
so, seems that there may be 2 spots an entry might be made..
a lot of motion in there sometimes, as in like my ship is afloat and moving when I'm telling it not to.
so I had to get a collector, too hard to be accurate in there sometimes.
they don't last long either.

 

[He$$eeTant]

Has anyone tried a Type 10, built for fighting Thargoid but - at least - up to now pretty useless….