After the better part of a week analysing the pod, a surface scan is conducted which requires contact between the scanner & the message pod.
What would this result for the NJ & the invading yong?
The Beast is a tech-organic virus. It utalizes organic matter to form a netural control net, with non-organic matter also being subverted. Think Zerg meets Borg.
It can use an infection beam, were the Beast nanities & robots can uses the plasma as a carrier medium. The expansion rate is hidiously fast, subverting a long Heavy cruiser(BIG ship) in a matter of seconds.
The Beast is very smart, and is capible of significant tactical & strategically planning. It is capible of masking it differences to fool other people into believing it hasnt been infected. So it will send a subverted shuttle to another ISD on the thinnest pretence it can use to gte the shuttle to entire the ship. It will also probable/will fake mayday messages to get the people to get clsoe to the subverted parts.
While shields will prevent infection beams (while they are up that is), and there are measures that can be taken to slow/stop subversion(venting drive plasma inside the ship), the Beast will know this, and can use other methods to gain physical access to the SW ships.
Also it was a Act of Plot that the Beast didnt get any planets in Homeworld: Cataclysm, which doesnt apply to this debate...
The Beast is a hive intellect, and sentient. When the Beast tech-organic cells encounter neural tissue, the neural tissue is preserved, allowing for the original personality to be a enforced member of the Beast. Each seperate discrete Beast organism will act in concert even if it means the destruction of a individual organism. Except for game balancing(in mutliplayer), there is no such thing as the central control node. More important nodes, yes. But the rest will not suddenly die/fall into confusion if the main controlling ship dies.
Also the Naggoroth(sp?) is somewere in the outer rim of the SW universe


A typical ISD has how many thousands of people? IIRC A human brain is about 1.3kg to 1.4 kg. Assuming a thousand people on the ISD, all weighing ~75kgs, the Beast would have a brain mass of 75 tons. Thats a f*ck lot of brain power. Granted a chunk will be taken up running the ship(not a huge chunk, because the overhead of the thousand individual bodies is gone) & reverse engineering all the tech but that still leaves a lot of idle brain power.
If you assume 15 thousnad people, you get a Beast mass of ~1125 tons