My take away is CIG may release a small handful of cap ships all sharing the aft third of the Bengal in common. That seems plausible since it would save them a huge amount of time on every ship design, and therefore allow them to offer more cap ships in total.
If this is where they’re headed, probably what it means is many more types of ships in game that cannot be owned or boarded. Like the Vanduul ships, we would likely never see the inside of these because there is no inside. CIG invented the Vanduul self-destruct so they wouldn’t need to model the Vanduul ships. These Bengal derivatives may well be the same kind of things—ships offered to the ‘verse for sake of storytelling that are not offered to players for actual use.
I’m okay with this. We were told long ago the Javelin was the largest purchasable ship and the Bengal a rare find some orgs could salvage and fly, and that these and the Idris were really the only player access cap ships. I think this is likely true and will continue to be true, so don’t get your knickers in a knot lusting after cool half-Bengal battle variants. Prolly not gonna happen. You will see them but won’t be able to steal or fly them, IMHO.
However, since they do plan to let us salvage the Bengal, it needs to be said this does seem to make it possible that salvaged Bengals could themselves be the basis for several playable ships. Maybe too much to hope for, but CiG does plan for us to salvage Bengals on a rare basis. Maybe this is that? Hmmmm. . .and maybe only the rarest of Bengal salvages can become full Bengal carriers? Maybe we’re seeing a new salvage dynamic where orgs compete for the most rare and complete Bengal salvaged and others get half a Bengal? Kinda like half a bagel and you get to choose butter or cream cheese?
You can imagine the crazy game dynamics that would arise if CIG made it impossible to store such ships. They’d instantly become the thing to steal, and the only way to hold them would be to convince dozens of players to camp on them at all times, and to place them where adversaries can’t find them.
But that would give us a game where the biggest stunts were all stealing the biggest ships. Who wants that?