That depends entirely on your knowledge of the subject technology. If you've ever passed by an industrial district on the highway and blankly thought "wow, I have no idea what that is for" then try and picture looking at a structure built by aliens. While you do have information gathered from captured Scavengers, most of them are about as wise in the ways of scav industry and logistics as you or I. That said, you can made rather reliable broad generalizations, such as distinguishing military, logistical, or commercial structures from one another using only a rough grasp of the species architecture and culture.

---

As for the Scav world-ships, they are somewhat easy to figure out in this way, due to their harshly spartan culture, everything is very practical in design, and thus tends to be more easy to interpret. In addition, unlike proper space cities, the world-ships seem to be more tightly designed, without a large, spinning ward structure but instead being a solid chunk of armored and shielded hull to maximize defense and minimize exposed surface area, and that surface is almost entirely devoted to weapon batteries, hangar bays, retractable dock yards, and industrial scale resource extraction and processing intakes. From your gathered memories of the scav society, you do know that most World-ships are built around scavenged sacred technology left behind by their gods, in addition to whatever valuable tech they find on the worlds they strip. The process of building a world-ship is in itself a form of worship, with the scavs using the resources they find to create a structure whose form itself is an expression of their devotion to the gods, using what resources they find like a divine, ship-building version of Iron Chef. As such, the world-ships are not always optimally built with a singular purpose in mind, but are instead built to maximize the use of the scavenged infrastructure. It is not uncommon for entire wards to be stripped districts of alien space cities or weapon batteries to be stripped down battleship hulls split open and grafted over the outer hull, but the inner core is almost always some manner of highly potent Watcher technology, which they tend to try to theme the rest of the ship around.

View more

Everything, even inanimate objects are vulnerable to void scrying. The difference is that it is much more difficult to find something when it is not psionically active unless it is personally linked to the one searching. While it is more difficult to find a default human than to find a psionically active human using scrying, the real differences are in the resistance to mental attack or manipulation. A normal human has a passive resistance that relies largely on its mental stealth to passively not be attacked, and once targeted directly will tend to corrode over an extended period of time, preventing being made into a long-term servant without modification, as you have seen. A psionically active individual, however, gains a layer of active mental defense built upon their own training and mental abilities to actively fight off any mental attack and resist such influences. A human psion has sacrificed a portion of their natural shallow presence in the Void in order to gain mental powers, but this effect is not 100% lost, only their long term self-destructive nature is totally removed. In essence, you could assume that the modifications made to the humans to allow them to suffer the influence of the Void are not all that dissimilar to your own receiving-only relay that you gave to Lee.

---

To think of it in typical RPG combat terms, default human resistance is essentially Evasion Tanking, while a psion is armor tanking, while a human psion is dipping into both.

View more