Personally I think crews this far in the future are irrelevant and the capsuleer is the only human onboard. Its the 21st century and we already have pilotless planes and ships. Why does anyone need a crew? Just get some androids and nanites to do the maintenance.

yk

From an engineering perspective, those unmanned aircraft you mentioned have a very large logistical and man power footprint. It doesn't remove the human element. It simply shifts it to other roles.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Hands_of_a_Killer_(Chronicle)


Took the advice of my last thread and have been reading these wonderful things in order.

Needless too say now I understand why some of the fan fiction writers use soft cloneing too keep some of their key crew alive, (except for the obvious reasons of not wanting to have to redo some character too character interaction by creating a new crew member) It is sad when you hire a crew only to be the cause of their deaths.

So when you are out in space and your ship turns into bright little pixels, what do you like too think happens too the crew of your ship. This is all personal opinion, so do not worry what is cannon or not. For example I take a darker side too this, most of my crew will unfortunately die as they will most likely not have enough time to get too warp capable escape pods, however are free from my original contract if they choose too be

Who would be dumb enough to crew a capsuleer vessel?

That means every time Jimmy gets ganked, 15,000 people die

No one needs a job that badly.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/New_Eden_crew_guidelines

Just to point out, we do have crew, and depending on the engagement, many may or may not survive

There was a fanfiction a while back, though I forget who wrote it, where a recruiter was going around hospices and terminal care wards all over New Eden hiring people to sign on as a fighter pilot.

the idea was simple: "you come work for the pilot, we pump you full of enough medicine, cybernetics and whatever else to keep you functioning, and you get to do something badass and amazing with the rest of your life. Survive a year, and we'll look into cloning you and then you can go on your way with a load of ISK. Deal?"

I like that angle, personally. and of course with the new DUST merc implants, there's no reason that ship's crew couldn't have those nowadays, though it would get very expensive very fast for a pilot.

Who would be dumb enough to crew a capsuleer vessel?

That means every time Jimmy gets ganked, 15,000 people die

No one needs a job that badly.

It would be interesting if this could be tied into the explosion of capsuleers over the years. We are the ones that served, survived, and were rewarded as per our contracts by the capsuleers they previously served on releasing the deposit to convert us to immortals. That way ever capsuleer has an ambitious, capable and motivated crew, and one with reason to take such ridiculous odds.

Personally I think crews this far in the future are irrelevant and the capsuleer is the only human onboard. Its the 21st century and we already have pilotless planes and ships. Why does anyone need a crew? Just get some androids and nanites to do the maintenance.

yk

^^^ This^^^

This.

I hated that the lore writers bent to old, boring, and cliche sci-fi canon by making space ships seem like flying cruise-liners with crews and ship quarters, etc.

yk

Am I the only one who feels odd knowing that just running a mission or even ratting for a bit results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?

I guess not. One of the Eve books covers what happens when a capsuleer blows up a colony just for the hell of it. Long story short, revenge.

The ships definitely have crew. Most of them are retrofitted from fully crewed models before pod technology and npc's (unless very specifically stated) are fully crewed and have no pod at all. When yours or an npcs ship explodes most get out alive and are scooped up by Sisters of Eve rescue teams. (we never see this represented in-game however)

The pod cuts out a lot of the need fro crew but doesn't eliminate it entirely. You can argue against this but it's just the lore...

Here's a thing for CCP to do for better ship explosion animations then! Imagine a thousand little pods leaving the ship juuuust as the ship's hull starts cracking. Would be awesome and really help the immersion. Not just a random flash and boom nothing. Also add floating little pods to wrecks while at it. And yes, i've used the 'i' word!

If enough people want it! I remember the threads saying missile effects will never happen, too much lag, server load, all excuses under the sun!

I know it'll always be immersion and story vs arcadey pewpew. Hopefully both can coexist.

To be fair, there's a good chance that when a ship is on general alert that their command stations are already inside escape pods.

Katrina, we're debating the merits of incorporating survival hardware into our vessels, not saying its immortal humans cloning back with us. Even in WH40K there was escape systems, armour to take incoming shots and the like. Even if it only reduces the death count to 10%, many are being killed en masse.

Silens here is an ex submariner and myself an Engineer, we make the intent to let the most people live but we can only take it so far before it becomes impractical. I don't think anything thats been proposed so far violates the economic viability of such survival additions.

We must assume that if a crew exists, this is their job and that we pay them. These are high tech pieces of equipment with corresponding expensive and specialised training, so investing in the reasonable survivability mechanisms to decrease replacement costs is just practical, not My Little Pony Online.