 This is Witchface news for Friday the 11th of August 2023. I'm CMDR Buur. In Elite Dangerous News this week, as more grim statistics are published on Galnet we take a look at why the Thargoids are so interested in harvesting millions of live humans where I think this might be heading and what it means for Thargoids on foot. As always if you enjoy our videos please do hit the like button and if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and ding the bell so you don't miss any of our Elite Dangerous content. If you'd like to help directly support our work you can also join our Patreon, links to that and everything else are below. Elite Dangerous launched to a somewhat rabid expectant fanbase on the 16th of December 2014. A year later the games first full paid expansion Horizons arrived, introducing amongst other things the games first planetary landings on airless worlds. Later in 2016 the first guardian surface sites were found and then in January of 2017 players began being hyperdicted by what we later learned to be the Thargoids. As the year old on the Thargoids became more aggressive and in September of 2017 it was discovered that as well as having no significant moral dilemma with introducing endothermic human life to the cold embrace of the vacuum they were for the first time witnessed deliberately targeting and then taking human occupied escape pods. We'll come back to that feature in a moment. From 2017 onwards the conflict, for little did we realise this was not yet actually a war, continued to roll on. They'd appear, we'd beat them down, they'd pop up somewhere else, we'd beat them down again. Our guardian based weapons and the tactics of pure human ingenuity getting increasingly better as we congratulated ourselves as the inevitable victors in the Pleiades spanning game of Galactic Wackerweed. We've got this we smugly thought to ourselves. Then came the Azimuth Corporation and the ironically monocled CEO Caleb Salvation witchily and is now legendary moment of triumph in HIP 22460 which saw not only his own physical death but the death of tens of thousands of human pilots both military and civilian. The firing of the Proteus device and our second attempted zenocidal extermination of their species drove the Thargoids into a fury the like of which we'd never before witnessed and in November of 2022 the Thargoid assault and subsequent invasion of the bubble began in earnest. Honestly you try and wipe an entire species off the face of the galaxy, twice and suddenly you're the bad guy. There's no pleasing some people or indeed slavering multi-limbed mandible faced insectoid monstrosities from beyond the stars. Talk about touchy. As the war evolved and expanded so did the tactics employed by the furious Sour Salad. We'd been a few years without seeing any new Thargoid variants but our own human history has proven time and again that there's nothing like a good war to drive progress and it seems the Pleiades panic pansies are not immune to this effect either. Since the war began nine months ago we have now seen to date at least no less than four new Thargoid variants but these variants are no longer of the kill human more better kind. The Goids, clearly having proven they are more than capable of performing that particular action whenever it suits them have moved their evolution in more specific directions. The Orthrus was the first of these specific variants to appear. Its appearance clearly belying its interceptor heritage and functionally it rapidly became apparent that the Orthrus had been bred for intelligence gathering. It has little interest in any other activity appearing as it does in Thargoid alert systems where it gathers up waiting Thargoid probes before attempting a rapid exit. Next we were faced with a new and very different threat to the spaceways. All too often when commanders ill equipped to deal otherwise are faced with a Thargoid they can turn tail, run and highway away. The Glaive Hunter variant however was very clearly introduced to stop that something it does perhaps a little too well on occasions. Its attacks specifically designed to stop ships dead in space, hold them dead in the water and then wear them down with relentless fast paced assaults. Revenant Drones, a variant of the familiar Thargoid scavenger then appeared at human settlements inside Thargoid controlled space to interfere with attempts to bring those settlements back online. I'll return to those in a moment. Most recently however things have taken an altogether darker and more sinister turn and it's here that we talk about the Thargoid Queen's latest pets. The Saive Hunter variant and its predilection towards the direct assault of passenger and escape pod carrying vessels with the explicit purpose of stealing those very humans. Once they are acquired the ship loses all interest in any present commander vessel and makes good its escape with its new cargo intact. Just this week a new Galnet article advises that Aegis have discovered that since the Thargoid assault started tens of millions of humans have simply vanished in the wake of the invasion. It can't have escaped the notice of even the most casual of elite players that the Thargoid storyline is 100% pushing us towards the question that I'm about to ask. Just what do the Thargoids want with live humans? There are as you'd expect with Elite Dangerous lots of theories floating about in the community right now. Whenever I think about it I keep coming back to the same options, those being food, CPUs for their ships, nurseries for their young, foot soldiers, pure research or nebulous actually humanitarian reasons. Let me just wipe the ones off the board right away that I think are extremely unlikely. Firstly food. If they had developed a taste for human based protein snacks it makes no sense that the Proteus wave would have been the catalyst for that hunger. They've known about us for a very long time and if hungry would likely have arrived in human space earlier before we showed ourselves to be an existential threat. Human snacks might be a nice byproduct of course, let's be honest a war with bovines would probably result in a fair few hamburgers but it seems unlikely to me that it's the Thargoids primary motivation. Humanitarian reasons. I've seen it mentioned in a few places that they're possibly just trying to save us from a worse even bigger badder enemy, the return of the long thought dead guardians. I'm not convinced, it makes no sense to me that a millions of year old alien insectoid species on a completely different evolutionary path to us would want to save us from another equally ancient equally diverse alien threat. Quite honestly until we tried salvation's galaxy spanning fly swatter on them I honestly don't think they gave two flying hoots about us either way. I don't think we were genuinely dangerous enough in our little tin spaceships utilizing Newton's third law just to move about whilst shooting directed energy and projectile slugs at them. It wasn't until we employed the technology of their ancient enemy, the guardians, that they actually really sat up and took notice. An enemy who, let us not forget, allegedly defeated the Thargoids and drove them back to their own territory. Nurseries for their young then. A very alien franchise-esque notion. What little we do know of the Thargoids has indicated that they are insectoid in nature and some insects on earth do have a propensity to deposit their young inside a, let's call it, readily available food source. Grim for sure and possibly a nice byproduct of the war. But again, the same as the food argument, I think such a need would have brought them to our doorstep much sooner. That leaves me with pure research, foot soldiers and CPUs. Pure research I'm going to call possibly a nice byproduct again but not a primary motivation. They don't seem to be the test tube type. Plus the Thargoid as a species strikes me as a more primordial creature. What we know of their evolution suggests a more deliberate direction driven by necessity approach. Human existence instead tends to stumble through happy accidents crossed with natural selection. Bees will feed their larval form royal jelly to create a queen and lead a hive. Humans hold an election and decide by democratic majority whilst also inventing tanks, iPads and the Rubik's Cube. That brings us to CPUs and foot soldiers and it's here that I think it gets interesting and even further into grim territory. CPUs then. This has long been a personal suspicion of mine, absolutely influenced by my love of the cult classic TV sci-fi Babylon 5. Brace yourself for spoilers to a 30 year old TV show. Babylon 5 featured an ancient insectoid alien species who kidnapped humans to use as the brain or central processing unit in their living biology based fighting vessels. It is of course just as likely that interceptors and hydras etc are all fed royal jelly during a larval stage or indeed that there's a Thargoid pilot sitting in the middle of all those petals. Recovered audio logs in the game from sites like the stack do seem to imply as well that in previous generations their ships at least there was a Thargoid pilot inside. Again CPUs for ships, possibly absolutely not necessarily a definite. My final option then foot soldiers. On elite dangerous discussions across the interwebs whenever this subject comes up you often see the term zombie bandied about. What it specifically references is humans that have been altered, co-opted and dare I say it assimilated to become tools of the greater Thargoid will. It's a prospect that can both delight and horrify the player base in equal measure and I use horrify in a negative sense in this particular context. Many seeing thargonized humans as a cheap way out for fdev. You see the words re-skinned bandied about liberally. It's been my limited game dev experience that things are rarely that simple but with some caveats I actually find the assimilated human prospect quite compelling from a gameplay perspective but I stress again there are some caveats to that. Let's cut to the chase here. The most compelling argument for that would be cool are the iconic Borg collective from Star Trek. Captured and kidnapped human beings infected with nanotechnology and co-opted by the hive like queen directed collective and turned into foot soldiers to drive and strive towards the greater collective's goals. They were relentless, insidious, creepy and terrifying and have quickly made it into just about every published list of top iconic sci-fi villains. I genuinely think a human infected with Thargoid technology could work as a worthy, creepy as all hell, adversary in on foot scenarios if handled correctly. They also solve a number of problems for fdev. Just as going upstairs was for Doctor Who's Daleks and unspoken Achilles heel for many years, when dealing with a very large slavering multi-limbed insectoid at say a settlement for example I suspect going indoors would be just as effective and yes I know the Daleks eventually invented an anti-gravity solution to stairs but you take my point I'm sure. As things stand the Thargoids are I would argue learning that they cannot occupy terrain i.e. settlements owned by humans. We just go indoors where the current surface weaponry that Revenant Drone can't reach us. Getting Thargoids to open doors and then navigate the crates, pot plants, chairs and tables etc all the while being stooped down low enough to not clip the ceiling and then still attack a heavily engineered commander wielding rocket launchers and plasma weapons sounds like a credibility stretch too They could of course absolutely breed smaller human sized Thargoids but that brings us back to why kidnap humans on mass again. We do know for an absolute provable fact that Frontier some years ago did conceptualise a Thargoid creature. They clearly had plans to put them in the game at some point. I won't spoil those concept images here if you haven't seen them they are out there if you google and they are very cool. They also appear to be very alien and not very door or ceiling friendly. It's possible I would suggest then that the tens of millions of missing may indeed be coerced and weaponised for the Thargoid cause into something resembling a biotechnological Borg army. I would also suggest however that those fleshy puppets still have a requirement for a Thargoid puppet master who will likely need their strings cut to truly stop any attack. In the event that we are faced with a Borg army and Thargoid puppet master it remains to be seen if that puppeteer is present at any surface conflict zones or is secured away in a nearby titan. Why do you think the Thargoids are suddenly so interested in us? Do you think we'll be faced with fighting assimilated humans? Do you think we'll ever get to see an actual live Thargoid? 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, O7 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.