People who have access to escape pods and who get paid well enough to let their families (and possibly themselves) live a life of luxury from there on.

do you go to a little room with a pod in the center of it and talk to a speaker in a console?
is it like John Carpenter's Dark Star where we open a little hatch and talk to the frozen body of our captain?

+1000 internets for the Dark Star reference. Lore should be altered to reflect this awesome vision. Frozen corpses should be encased in blocks of ice and pods should look like futuristic refrigerators.

Who is the DEV who first floated the idea that our ships are crewed?

it makes no sense
every facet of our ship's operations is governed by our skills, not the crew's skills
the podster operates all the weapons, support and defensive systems

lets imagine for a moment that you are a lowly yeoman on a calradi BC and you need to so see the captain about something

do you go to a little room with a pod in the center of it and talk to a speaker in a console?
is it like John Carpenter's Dark Star where we open a little hatch and talk to the frozen body of our captain?

do you see that this makes no sense?
if theres dozens if not hundreds of people running around my ship like its some kind of office building, then why am I sitting in a bucket of goo isolated from, but lording over them like some sort of clone Svengali

really, how was it decided that ships have crews?

Seriously, think of how many people a level four mission kills...

[they could incorporate planet bombs with dust
the lower your skill the more they talk back to you and explode in the bomb bay

Hmm

Alright, I've just done The Assault on Sisi. Let's run the numbers. I destroyed...

Coreli Guardian Initiate x4
...
ALRIGHTY THEN.

*Okay, so, I'm usin......

Actually would be cool if your ship had to load up a crew in order to gain full combat readiness. Automatically of course, with some densely populated systems this would be near instant, while remote locations slower, giving a "lost in space" feeling. Add a chance for expert personnel with slight bonuses.

Obviously this type of immersion wouldn't appeal to some of you 3d Galaga players out there like ms puffy lips

Oh god. Between you and the guy lecturing CCP about the actual mass of stars..

Make this suggestion elsewhere.

I don't mean it in a dismissive way. on the contrary
Copy paste this and post all around. Particularly in the ideas and features and let it get some exposure. Your suggestion is one of the few that have quite a bit of merit and sounds cool as hell

I've always preferred idea that EVE ships don't have any living soul on board except the pod pilot, where everything else are highly automated systems, nanobots, drones and what not, all connected directly to human mind. Ship would be sort of huge mechanical extension of pod pilot's body. For me, this makes much more sense than actual lore.

That, or Clear Skies 'old school' setup with pilot yelling, running around and getting his hands dirty.

Things decay, and things break. With every shot fired, with every warp tunnel created.. with every cycle for every module the efficiency drops for a certain percentage for a certain reason. Might be metal fatigue, might be a thousand tiny scratches.

And that sort of damage NEVER happen on a constant basis. A computer cannot predict when a specific L connection on a specific component will break. It can, at best, make an 'educate' guess. And on the subject of making educated guesses no computer can replace a living, breathing person.

I've always preferred idea that EVE ships don't have any living soul on board except the pod pilot, where everything else are highly automated systems, nanobots, drones and what not, all connected directly to human mind. Ship would be sort of huge mechanical extension of pod pilot's body. For me, this makes much more sense than actual lore.

That, or Clear Skies 'old school' setup with pilot yelling, running around and getting his hands dirty.

I'd like to point out that we have repairers that use nanites to repair armor and structure at a staggering rate. I'm sure a little metal-fatigue is well within the capabilities of the on-board systems to diagnose and repair on a regular basis. There is no need for crew on the magical starships that populate the EVE universe.

Not really. The problem lies in diagnosing like i said before.

Not really. A human crew will be slower and will use the same tools that a computer crew would. A human would probably use some "intuition", but there is no reason why a repair crew couldn't inspect the ship while docked. In space, where capsule ships are used and abused in ways that no sane person (aside from an immortal) could even imagine, automated systems are perfectly fine. Especially considering that a ship can essentially be rebuilt from scratch during combat.

Like i said, if the technology for making frigate sized pod-ships have no crew is there, then its definatly possible for it to be applied to larger scale ships (The Eidolon, for instance, has no crew. Its a battleship). However since we know that the larger ships are, in fact, crewed, then we will have to asume that it IS cheaper and more efficient to use live crews then it is to use automated systems.

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

Table comes from a fanfest presentation by CCP, which I'm too lazy to look up. It's on the youtubes.

There are no crews on our ships apart from ourselves and it makes sense this way.


Otherwise why can a suicide ganker constantly find new crew. No crewman would go anywhere near a capsuleers ship. They are constantly in danger and lose a lot of ships yet the capsuleer always escapes and even if he dies he wakes up somewhere else.

Whats the going rate of pay for that

answer

nothing as ive never paid a isk to anyone.

it's my understanding that the NPC versions of the ships have crews.

They were designed to have crews.

They have crew quarters, etc.


HOWEVER, pod-pilot technology comes along, and ships are retrofitted so you can be neurally jacked into the ship and control everything yourself.