I tend to go along with CMDR Dreamstate that they're ships - likely ruined by mycoid from the Thargoid war. Why? well:
- The Commodities Market description of the Unknown Link says that they are found at Large Wreck sites. The Unknown Links are only found (constructed/provided) at these Thargoid sites. I contend that if they were freshly growing ships, they wouldn't be referred to as "wrecks" - this implies that they've been destroyed or damaged or, well, "wrecked" in some fashion.
- They are covered in some horrible looking corrosion that the Scavengers are interacting with - this looks like it has played a part in damaging the structures. On top of that, the outer areas of the sites are, at some of the sites, clearly broken, rather than in a more juvenile form, whereas others are more intact.
- The inactive sites have cave-ins preventing access to the central room. This is more likely to have happened in a crash, rather than as part of growth. The insides of some of the active sites don't even have doors intact around the central navigation room. I also think it's likely that this central navigation room is the bridge of the ship.
I would say from looking that these are indeed crashed ships, whether they're "motherships" or "capital ships" will be a point of contention until we actually see things of this size engaging us in battle. BUT... I wouldn't throw away the "barnacles grow into ships" theory because: beware spoilers for Elite Dangerous: Premonition
- The Commodities Market description of the Unknown Link says that they are found at Large Wreck sites. The Unknown Links are only found (constructed/provided) at these Thargoid sites. I contend that if they were freshly growing ships, they wouldn't be referred to as "wrecks" - this implies that they've been destroyed or damaged or, well, "wrecked" in some fashion.
- They are covered in some horrible looking corrosion that the Scavengers are interacting with - this looks like it has played a part in damaging the structures. On top of that, the outer areas of the sites are, at some of the sites, clearly broken, rather than in a more juvenile form, whereas others are more intact.
- The inactive sites have cave-ins preventing access to the central room. This is more likely to have happened in a crash, rather than as part of growth. The insides of some of the active sites don't even have doors intact around the central navigation room. I also think it's likely that this central navigation room is the bridge of the ship.
I would say from looking that these are indeed crashed ships, whether they're "motherships" or "capital ships" will be a point of contention until we actually see things of this size engaging us in battle. BUT... I wouldn't throw away the "barnacles grow into ships" theory because: beware spoilers for Elite Dangerous: Premonition
We learn in Premonition from Bill Turner that the Thargoids do indeed grow their ships and components. They have a different tech base to ours, we use inorganic matter, whereas they grow components with comparable properties. So I wouldn't be surprised if the barnacles are grown to harvest materials and elements from the ground in order to imbue whatever is inside them with specific properties - the meta alloys being one of those things - the Oresrian scout ships then come and extract meta alloys from the barnacle, but don't completely strip them (the same way you treat, for example, a basil plant).
Premonition gives us a good look at exactly what the meta alloys actually do, and why they're so valuable - you shove a chunk into a machine with a missing component and it automatically transforms itself into the component to complete the machine as if it has an innate understanding of the machine it's been put in - which would make it the prime candidate for the main fruit and purpose of the barnacles. However, the barnacles are surrounded by meta alloy spires, the same as the large wrecks, so the barnacles could indeed be juvenile scout or motherships.
HOWEVER, the large wrecks are not fresh from the barnacle.
It would also be interesting to see if the Alliance already knows about these Large Wreck Sites, since they played a massive part in the Thargoid war, and have used captured Oresrian ships for decades to reverse engineer tech from them - like the Frame Shift Drive, and MetaDrive's Wake Concealment module.
I strongly suspect the Alliance will be the source of our anti-Thargoid technology to come in 2.4.
I wonder whether, with a mass lock factor of 40, it was the scout ships that Salome, Hassan and Luko saw, or these larger "Capital ships", considering that the Cutter has a MLF of 27, and the scout ships seem to be of comparable size. Food for thought.
Premonition gives us a good look at exactly what the meta alloys actually do, and why they're so valuable - you shove a chunk into a machine with a missing component and it automatically transforms itself into the component to complete the machine as if it has an innate understanding of the machine it's been put in - which would make it the prime candidate for the main fruit and purpose of the barnacles. However, the barnacles are surrounded by meta alloy spires, the same as the large wrecks, so the barnacles could indeed be juvenile scout or motherships.
HOWEVER, the large wrecks are not fresh from the barnacle.
It would also be interesting to see if the Alliance already knows about these Large Wreck Sites, since they played a massive part in the Thargoid war, and have used captured Oresrian ships for decades to reverse engineer tech from them - like the Frame Shift Drive, and MetaDrive's Wake Concealment module.
I strongly suspect the Alliance will be the source of our anti-Thargoid technology to come in 2.4.
I wonder whether, with a mass lock factor of 40, it was the scout ships that Salome, Hassan and Luko saw, or these larger "Capital ships", considering that the Cutter has a MLF of 27, and the scout ships seem to be of comparable size. Food for thought.
