What do you think of these axon looking things?
Given the similarities to axon terminals I was wondering if they were for delivering information/status report of their surrounding equipment
But the one at moon's gravity disruptor feels more like its sampling data from the engine (the last few times I went through that room it ragdolled very hard upon entering due to the gravity lol)
And looking at that screenshot I just took from the map website, it also has the "reading halo", so it probably is catching on information rather than relaying it
Ah, these things - there's not a lot to go on with them, but they're certainly interesting. I'm going to use the game's internal nomenclature and call them "coral stems" for clarity.
Coral stems seem to interact with an Iterator's internal biota in much the same way as their more common cousin, the wall mycelia. Both organisms sprout from the Iterator's internal walls, attracting to their hyphae neuron flies and the free-floating hyphae of coral neurons and inspectors. The sparking effect produced upon contact with these organisms is identical to that seen between interacting overseers, so I'm inclined to believe it represents the exchange of information (rather than say, energy or nutrients) between an Iterator's stationary machinery and its free-floating organic parts. The question then is how the role of coral stems in this interface differs from the role of the wall mycelia.
As you implied, the segmented body of a coral stem closely resembles an axon wrapped in a myelin sheath, the part of a neuron that transmits signals away from the cell body. In such an analogy, the cell body would have to be the machinery the coral stem is anchored to. The wispy mycelia growing from that machinery would then seem to fit the description of dendritic branches, thin growths that receive signals from other cells. So one interpretation could be that the coral stems and wall mycelia perform opposite functions, delivering messages to and receiving messages from the free-floating biota respectively.
Another possibility is that the wall mycelia and coral stems are both sensory organs, but with complementary roles. The mats of wall mycelia are not especially dense, but their hyphae extend into a large part of an Iterator's internal spaces. This makes them well-adapted to sensing macroscopic organisms like neuron flies or coral neurons. These organisms are unevenly distributed in a way that requires hyphae to be able to reach them no matter where they are in a room, but their large size and weight ensures that any nearby hyphae will certainly be disturbed by their presence and brushed against them. In contrast, small particles like microorganisms or chemical traces in the air would be unlikely to collide with the scarce hyphae of wall mycelia, and too light to be reliably detected when they do.
The bundled hyphae of coral stems could act like scent traps for these particles—when one happens to wander into a coral stem's bristles, it's likely to become trapped and bounce around among the dense hyphae for a time, the repeated collisions ensuring that there are many chances for it to be detected. Of course, coral stems are distributed much more sparsely than wall mycelia, but that would be just fine for this purpose. Diffusion ensures that the distribution of small, light particles is relatively homogeneous throughout a space: the air in one part of a room is about the same as the air in any other part, so there'd be no need for too many coral stems close together.
I hope this provided some food for thought, thanks for the ask!