Just a random thought I had, and thought I'd let others weigh in on it.

I noticed that http://images.uesp.net/6/62/TR-creature-HulkingFabricant.jpg from Tribunal, look an awful lot like the http://images.uesp.net/4/43/SR-creature-Chaurus.jpg from Skyrim. Did the devs just take inspiration from this design, is it completely unrelated, or did Sotha Sil make his cyborgs from some kind of Morrowind-based subspecies?

And then, in the First http://www.imperial-library.info/content/pocket-guide-empire-first-edition-wild-regions, it mentions that Orcs domesticate a shaggy centipede-like animal. Could this be another type of Chaurus?

Probably just the devs taking inspiration from an older, less popular game. The fabricants appear to be giant salamanders with the scorpion legs and tail grafted on after the fact, while the chaurus is, obviously, an insect.

In biology, effective morphology and behavior is often repeated by other organisms. This can take the form of mimicry or convergent evolution. Sotha Sil's fabricants are at least partially created by him, and real world rules of biology don't fit TES, but the fabricant/chaurus blueprint is probably just simply an instance of successful forms being repeated - even if they are completely unrelated.

Besides the fact that they both walk on four pointy legs, there's really no similarities between them. I vote for completely unrelated, not even for inspirational purposes.

As Terry Pratchett would put it: Most fish are remarkably fish-shaped.

Which is indeed something that most people would look at you funny for mentioning, but does bear thinking about. Some shapes seem to just be the best for a certain function.

That's evolution though, that's totally different to designing animals because evolution needs to function to survive, the latter can obviously be whatever it wants.

Out of curiosity. Would it be possible for some fabricants to still be around? Or did they all get destroyed in Tribunal?

I think the palace guards cleaned up all the fabricants that weren't in the clockwork city.

Though for all we know some were captured and sold to the Telvanni, who lost them when they retreated from Vvardenfell in the Red Year. In Solstheim, there are still rumours of mechanical beasts plaguing the land.

They might have the same skeleton for animations or reused the skeleton.

Looks that way. They are quite similar. Especially in terms of how the skeletons animations would play out.

That seems incredibly unlikely, given the vast difference in animation quality between Morrowind and Skyrim.

Would. Not Do.

I knew there was something familiar about the Chaurus. Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, aren't they about the same size as the Fabricants?

I'll choose to believe that the Chaurus encountered in Skyrim are just one of a whole species of large insectile adventurer-eater, with variations in Morrowind having inspired Sotha Sil's dabbling, and variations elsewhere having been domesticated by Orsimer.

Maybe the Khajiit use really huge, relatively docile ones as beasts of burden in Elsweyr.

Given that Fabricants are synthetic animations of the Clockwork City, the question of whether or not they're still around is just the same as whether or not Sotha Sil survives in some form or another. I, for one, posit that it is certainly possible that the Clockwork city still be around, and with it the Fabricants. This is all speculation, of course, but I believe that Sotha Sil may have foreseen his impending un-potheosis and "uploaded" himself into the Clockwork City itself before Ayem even got a chance to "kill" previous god-body. If this is the case, than it is entirely seemly that Fabricants are still being produced there.

Not sure how "cannon" this is, but:
http://www.imperial-library.info/content/sotha-sils-last-words

Divayth Fyr's first post.