As far as I can tell, Thargoid warships have three distinct advantages over GalCop (who I'll be using as a reference as I don't have much knowledge on the Federation and the Alliance):
1.) Thargoids have mastered witchspace technology allowing them to slip in, out, and even stay indefinitely inside at will. This gives them incredible strategic maneuverability unmatched by current Galcop tech which requires witchspace beacons to safely shift their forces without resorting to time-consuming calculations and dead reckoning.
2.) Every Thargoid warship is a miniature carrier with each being able to carry five drones apiece. This significantly increases the amount of firepower that can be brought to bear on a target and improves their survivability by increasing the number of combatants in a dogfight.
3.) Thargoid warships have very capable turret tech that allows them to accurately engage targets in a 360 degree field around them. Getting behind a warship then is still a risky proposition. The only blind spots, I presume, are the warship's top and bottom which are hard to target in the chaos of a dogfight.
If GalCop ever manages to get its act together (though reading from the stories, I'll concede that this is a very big if), all three of these reasons can be effectively nullified.
Yes, Thargoids can slip in and out of witchspace at will, maybe even very close to stations and planets, but these incursions are one-way deals. Every warship fights to the death with no other goal except to cause as much damage as possible. This is basically the stellar equivalent of suicide bombing which is not an economical use of their military forces. Even if we don't know much about their industrial capacity and how capable they are of replacing their losses, it's still a losing battle for them when they never actually do any damage to GalCop's shipyards and every ship has the potential to take out an entire squadron of Thargoid warships via Q-bomb.
While GalCop is no Imperium of Man with it's billions of worlds and trillions of soldiers, it's still engaged in a perpetual cold war with two other opponents alongside the Thargoid threat. Their military budget has to be huge with wartime production working overtime to crank out fighting ships and no shortage of warm bodies to crew them with so many opponents existing to unite all the citizens of GalCop against the common foes. During World War II, the Allies fielded tens of thousands of aircraft in both theaters of war and they were just a few countries on one planet. How many more could GalCop send out with the thousands of planets under it's domain? Especially knowing that out of the three galactic entities, GalCop is the economic powerhouse? Logistically speaking, the Thargoids have already lost the war by engaging not just one but all three of the great powers.
Looking at things from a tactical point of view, the Thargoids do have the advantage in dogfights. All the more reason not to engage in them then. Back in the pacific theater of WWII, Japanese Zeros could out-climb, out-turn, and out-shoot anything the Allies had much like the Thargoids do now. The Allies responded by inventing boom and zoom tactics. A squadron of Hellcats (heavily armed and armored fighters that could dive very quickly due to their weight) would patrol at high altitudes and, when ground radar had picked up enemy fighters, would dive down screaming at ludicrous speeds guns blazing through the enemy formation doing as much damage as possible before climbing up and out of sight while the enemy fighters scrambled to figure out what the hell was going on.
While the in-game limit of 10 km to the scanning range is perhaps an issue of gameplay and story segregation, it's logical that any scanning tech the Thargoids would have will be inferior to station or satellite based detection systems. Coordinating a squadron of naval vessels to stalk the warships from just out of range before screaming in on fuel injectors is thus an obvious tactic. Given that the military laser was designed to destroy a warship in one salvo if all shots hit their target, a competent squadron should be able waste an equal number of Thargoids in one pass and be out of scanning range again before any warships could react with the ridiculous speeds ships are capable of reaching with witchfuel injectors. Hell, the Navy might even consider using the old dive-bomber tactics to lob a Q-bomb into their midst. If civilian traders can hit pirates at high speeds using cargo pods (I'm looking at you Captain Hesperus!), something like this ought to be peanuts for navy flyboys. This way, you don't even need multiple squadrons to cover a large area of space. One squadron can split into individual ships patrolling their own sectors whilst being coordinated by the station crew.
Hence, both strategically and tactically, I don't really see why Thargoids are the threat everyone makes them out to be. I'd rather keep my eye on the Federation and Empire. Us humans can be sneaky bastards.
Your thoughts?
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Capt. Murphy's OXPs
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In Frontier, it was possible to jump further than 7 light-years using Hydrogen as fuel, but Frontier ships don't use the same in-system reactionless drive technologies that are used in the Co-operative. Thargoid technology may allow them to overcome the 7 light-year limit.