Attention all shipboard personnel: venting all crew space into hard vacuum in T-5 seconds. Your families will be mailed your last pay-check. Bye-ee.

I would like to be able to walk around my ship.

Just sayin'....

I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to allow players to swim around in their pods

Lol...and they were all 2 days from retirement...such a shame.

Aren't the crew pretty much always 2 days from "retirement" on a capsuleer ship?

WOULDNT THAT BE SWELL? Instead of blowing somebody up and only getting a few random modules, you could board them and the dust 514 dudes would fight each other for control of the ship. If they win, you'd get the whole ship and all the modules. If they lose, then you blam them anyways.
DOLLA DOLLA BILLS YALL

Yeah how wonderful and what would you do for an hour while people are fighting over your ship?

I like to imagine the crew changes every time I dock...so when my ship goes boom it means only the group that was unlucky enough to undock on that flight are toast, countless crew members have made flights then without dying.

I don't know if lore addresses this, but I think of the crew more as flight attendents, meaning they aren't tied to my ship exactly. And considering the piloting, targeting and firing are handled by me in the pod, the remaining tasks can't be too heavy on the skilled labor (which leads me to believe the crew members are interchangeable).

Like I said, not a lore buff, so don't know if this is addressed, but I'd like to think not every crew member that flies with me is destined to die horribly...maybe there is that one that lives to old age...

He said, "I heard ... I heard that a lot of the pods were destroyed right away. They were buffeted away from the ship when it exploded, but instead of heading off-radar like usual, many of them disintegrated. Not the outlying ones, though, with the crew and the families that had been working on nonessential tasks; those got out safe. It was the edge pods, the ones at the core that can only leave a few seconds before the ship literally falls to pieces."

A couple of the chronicles address that. The one I could find was this http://community.eveonline.com/background/potw/default.asp?cid=20-04-09 which implies that most of the crew manages to escape a destroyed ship in lifepods.

So if ship weapons cannot penetrate shield and armor (they have to be whittled away first,) how would the boarding crews get on board? I don't think cutting torches and explosives would be all that effective against defenses that can shrug off gigawatt lasers and artillery rounds from a 1400mm (aka 4.5 feet) cannon. Would boarding crews have to wait until the target ship was in hull? And then hope that the shield regen (or shield booster) doesn't fry them like a bug zapper? (Or seal them in solid armor in the case of armor reppers.)

Cause everyone else in system is going to sit quietly while the two (or more) ships are locked in a 30min FPS boarding action...

[quote=stoicfaux]
How would boarding crews get on board?
Maybe you've shot their ship a bunch of times, to 30% armor so a bunch of their ship is messed. You dock on the hole you've created in their ship. But need to be within 2k and both ships moving less than 30m/s to activate magnetic space grapple to board. Ship or module stats could give + to 'grapple' resistance to prevent.

At that point, you're almost dead and locked down, what benefit is winning the boarding match?
"Well boys, we couldn't get a free ship"
*pop*

So I stand by my self destruct at the start.

well then maybe it's a 'double or nothing' sort of thing then. you could blow his ship up and get three or four modules.. or you could board him, and have the chance to get almost all of his modules. but if you lose... you get nothing. if you lose then you lose all of the isk you spent feeding and training that now very dead infantry combat crew :)

Really swell, Beve!

well...
I'd go for boarding like in starfleet command. Like drop your commandos onto an enemy ship to disrupt systems etc.
...the counter would be exotic dancers, of course.

I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to allow players to swim around in their pods

This reminds me of the PC game HOMEWORLD whcich had agame mechanic which allowed you to take over other ships with a certain type of boarding ship that had space marines boarding you

Yet it seems like CCP refuses to touch this issue with a ten meter pole for some reason. Why? A lost ship is a lost ship as far as the victim is concerned, so does it really matter the lost it to an explosion or outright theft?

I'm sorry. I didn't realise CCP removed ejecting from a ship/boarding a ship and the Orca Ship Maintenance Bay in the last patch.