The logs actually state that it was a recent change of priorities - the exact wording is ‘The noise changed a few weeks ago. But it wasn’t until you mentioned millions of people vanishing that the new melody made sense.’…
You're right about the wording. However, a change of priorities doesn't mean "weren't doing it before" either.
Most intelligent species are capable of having more than one idea at a time otherwise they would have no concept of priorities. I think the captures have been going on since the start of the war, not as a priority or a dedicated goal as such but happening regardless. They would have to be taking people as well as territory for so many to be missing already and for reports of it to be able to go back months, and what she is picking up now is the change of priority to captives over territory and also that they now have a purpose for the captives. Which doesn't exclude all thought of taking further territory either. In practical terms we do not need to second guess them either way and will continue to starve them of as many new systems as we can.
whatever motivated them to begin focusing on capturing humans over purely taking territory, I can’t be sure. But I’d bet it has something to do with the resistance they’ve been meeting.
Could be. Maybe they've taken as much territory as they need to for whatever they are doing next, even with us taking a lot of it back. Or they may have thought ok, well, if we're going to do this we need to do it now
before they take too much back.
Though I’d have to question what they were doing with the populations trapped behind the lines after their initial arrival until now, then.
My tinfoil - the pods they picked up before the war machine arrived gave them the biological and technological knowledge necessary to be able to capture millions of us and keep us alive should they ever need or want to. Why? Doesn't matter, there may not have even been a plan at that point, work out how to capture them now and figure out what to do with them later. We do things just because we can or think it might be useful for some future purpose that we haven't fully specified at the time, so why couldn't another species?
That aside, I think what’s happening to make systems harder to defend/retake closer to a Titan is just purely dedicating a larger force of Thargoids to systems closer to their equivalent of a forward operating base. They might be able to show up wherever they like at any point in time… but that doesn’t mean they’d neglect keeping their most important asset(s) in the war defended*.
That's possible. The difficulty curve may simply represent that level of reinforcement and has nothing to do with energy requirements for maintaining reinforcements over distance. There are always more guards around the palace than anywhere else, a human perspective yes but protecting one's leaders is also a concept that doesn't have to be exclusively human.
*I understand the caveat that the nature of space makes this somewhat redundant, but maybe they think holding space around it makes people want to retake that territory, rather than assault the cause of its occupation directly. Could just as easily work the other way around, though.
And since Titans are easily capable of moving through space with no chance of interception by human ships, that also kind of goes against the idea they’d bother too much with holding territory closer to it more fiercely than systems that are further out.
The whole idea that creatures with a better command of hyperspace than us, whose FSD technology we have a basic stolen version of, who can and do run rings round us in hyperspace, the idea that a race like that would need to follow tired old war clichés about supply lines and distance from the beachhead - in space - has struck me as ridiculous from the start, only put in to give us a handle on things and the armchair generals a feeling of validation. This has the potential to be a high concept science fantasy war doing something truly different. What a waste of that potential if this is all there is.
More tinfoil - remember last year when they appeared to be doing recons into our space but retreated before it came to a fight? Our attention was drawn to this by Patreus and others in Galnet who speculated that they were evaluating us somehow.
Suppose this is an extension of that. They don't need to do war this way. The whole war machine is a controlled experiment. Trying war our way, using concepts we understand, as a test of our capability within a framework familiar to us. And a massive distraction from what they are really doing.
On the barnacle note… I kind of had this not-so-great, but also possibly unfounded thought of them being processing centers of some kind. Which also begs the question why they’re in unpopulated space rather than populated… but it’s not like this war has given us more answers than questions. At least, in regards to Thargoid motivations.
Seo JIn-ae mentions tunnels and caves, we assume she means inside the Titan but at the barnacle sites as well would be cool. They've made the distinction of calling them a matrix which suggests a more complex structure than a basic barnacle site. People have been asking for tunnels and caves. Maybe this is where it starts.
I get the impression that said movement was not quite so easy! If it were, by now I imagine that at least one of them would have displayed the ability to move again after forming a Maelstrom.
Depends what their purpose is. If it was to move to a position and establish a base of operations there's no need for it to move on yet, assuming it could and isn't stuck there. Not moving on doesn't necessarily mean it can't, just means it hasn't yet.
I imagine instead that the energy source which let them soar across the Galaxy is now expended
Why would you assume that it's something that couldn't be replenished? Maybe it has a massive fuel tank that needs filling up again and that takes a few months. They are parked round Ammonia worlds, which we presume they have used to generate the maelstrom around themselves for protection. They could also be using those worlds as a gigantic fuel pump / battery to refuel / recharge.
and that whether a Titan has ever moved or retreated before—as opposed to leaving them abandoned—is an open question.
My tinfoil for this is that the abandoned ones we see on planets are the old mothership models from the first war. They have now been upgraded and the Titan is the mothership GTI Evo 2. Fuel Injection (ammonia), 3 times the size, 10 times the power. Custom porthole covers, media player and captured enemy storage optional.
