Because you are worthy of saving after the ship destruction...Screw the crew.

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?

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.

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

Damn, are EVE players _THIS_ ignorant of the backstories?...

While you are directly linked with the ship systems, there's still a lot being done by crew members. And one of the differences (iirc) between T1 and T2 is that the former are retrofit ships, while the latter are specially designed for capsuleers.

And every time a ship blows up, all the crew is assumed to be dead and compensation automatically paid out. However many, if not most, actually survive it's just too much of a hassle to do the paperwork. So many crew members will have flown with several ships.

So suicide ganks likely mean no crew get killed, as they all probably jumped ship before concord started shooting.

And disconnects are disgruntled gunners / navigators pulling the plug.

This ^

Also you may pay more for faster loading, the worst your survival record the greater the incentives. The longer you have your ship the more bonuses you will get. etc...

The capsule pilot is the bridge crew, everything else on the ship is still run by regular people. There is way too much going on for a single person to do, especially on ships as big as battleships, let alone capitals.

You're not alone OP, deal with it.

This ^

Also you may pay more for faster loading, the worst your survival record the greater the incentives. The longer you have your ship the more bonuses you will get. etc...

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.

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.

Parien said. "I expect your aim was to empty them of their valuables."


"Do you presume to know my thoughts?"


"I doubt anyone does, sir," Parien said, regretting it immediately. The words were an insult, and only his weak voice with its supplicant tone carried it through with apparent acceptance on the capsuleer's part.

"This is what youGÇÖll face. Madmen locked inside capsules, squandering lives as if they were nothing. When you are up there you are a tool, nothing more. A slave to the will of a pilot, bound to a man immortal until his mind can no longer be cloned."

Because there is a massive hole in the skills hierarchy - that of crew skill training.

We should be able to skill up our crews in various ways to increase the efficiency of the ship we are flying...but, if we get blown up, we lose a random crew training skill, just the same as a subsystem skill is lost when an T3.

More importantly, it could be used to give a random outcome for pierats (remember original pirate crews would regularly mutiny and elect a new captain) - so if a pirate decides to suicide gank, there should be a random chance that his crew will refuse and eject the pilot into space.

[Someone refereed to the Eve book " The Burning Life" as a good book - I'd just like to point out that it is in fact the worst spaceship book I think I've ever read - the Empyrean Age wasn't very good either but reads like Shakespear compared to TBL]

For good descriptions of how large ships are run by small crews, read the Relevation Space series by Alastair Reynolds - simple the BEST spaceship/sci-fi books

G

It makes me feel so warm and fuzzy inside knowing so many people haven't looked at the back story to eve.


if more people played EvE as EvE and not


omgspaceshipkillboredpointscoreingonline

or

LOLspredsheatsminmaximastockbrokerandthisisfun



i think it would be better for everone

yeah... well the back story here is weak

and the rest has quite a few plot holes too, but hey it's not a scifi epic, its a back story to a game

and in the crew department, its lacking

If something breaks, how will it be fixed?

honestly?

that was terrible, really....
but at lease I know where this silliness started

I don't know about your ships, but my ships have crews. Also, in my ships I stand on my bridge and don't float in a goo.

I respect CCP's efforts to tie game mechanics into the background - and a smooth tie in at that.

But I tend to ignore that part of the background.

So give me crew, give me bridges, battle bridges, navigation centers, engineering sections, and escape pods.

I don't care who says its so, it don't make sense

who the heck would sign up for a suicide mission? and in the billions

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.

*points to all those windows on his ship*

Pretty sure that's and indication that there's a crew....

Honestly, what's wrong with having crew?

Would make the game much more fun to actually have to assemble a crew with talents in things like:

Gunnery
Navigation
Engineering

If anyone played the old browser game "Space Pirates" you understand what I'm getting at.

If not.

Basically, SP had crew you could hire that would affect your ship above it's base traits. You also had Morale and if it went to low...ya..they mutiny :P


Also, the whole "pod pilot" thing is really stupid. Look at the ships...you can CLEARLY make out sections that would be the "Bridge". Why have a bridge? It says in the Tutorial that our "outside view" is from chase camera drones...

Hopefully, with this WiS, they'll revamp some of the lore surrounding how we control these massive ships.

Ooooh, ya...I so want to be able to launch boarding parties and boot people out of their ships; provided they lose the Boarding Fight


BTW: The human brain is simply not capable; nor will it EVER be capable (unless its size grows) to control a ship the size of anything larger than a Frigate. And if you use the "Well we have super computers running all that other stuff". Then my response is:

WHY THE HELL ARE WE EVEN IN THE SHIPS

They are obviously, then, capable of running completely on their own with only us issuing orders for the A.I. to process.

The "i'm the only one on the ship" is one of the major cons this game has for me.


-anyways, that's my take on it.

heeyeyyy CCCPPPS
I DONT LIKE CREWS
THEY MAKE MY RP HURTTT
My BUtt HURTS

REMOVE creweS From EVE cauSE I sSay SO

SCNIRCERELY, the OP.

To hit on a few points you brought up, the reason there are so many windows and a visable bridge on all eve ships is because, all the sips where designed first and formost for none capsilier use. they where then converted after their original design for our use.

are you sure those are windows?

Those are not windows they are sensor panels but they double up as a 'view' prot to a video screen correlated on the inside.

All ships in eve are built for non capsullers just the more recent ones are built with the capabilities in the first place instead of retrofitted. Every capsuller in the eve universe is represented by the players exception to the few named NPC ones that you cant seem to kill pernamently and are tougher than normal rats.

Capsuleer technology basically removes deparment heads and chain of commands which on real ships is a massive portion of its crew. So the only crew you have left are 'grunts' and 'expert grunts.'

Though automation technologies the pod does bring this doubles back into non capsulleer ships as well and those ships arent crewless ception to the infested ones.

Also somone has got to man the nanite pumps and tell each and every single pump what exactly they're fixing instead of slapping in glass stucturing isntead of a power conduit. The nanites in eve are pertty stupid in comparison to some of the VIs/AIs

As for all those saying they want to command the ship though a bridge needs to sit down and rethink thier posture.

When you pod jack into a ship, you become the ship. Every bit of damage the ship receives registers as pain. Warp induces a euphoria, you can potentially get motion sick from breakneck manuvers and your semi sub concious thoughts are transmitted to the crew, afterall you are thier master after god.

Luckily your training from concord on the behalf of your empire sponsorship gets you used to the idea of being the ship.

***For the piracy to pay for itself, the pirates are going to need to run many successful operations for every one the players blow up, so this doesn't help much. A quick estimate suggests I destroyed something in the region of 3.2 billion isk (...and was paid the princely sum of 24 million... I think I want a raise); how many ships do the Serp need to have out there to make that profitable? (And then- how large does the NPC economy have to be that the pirates can leech this much out of them easily and without crippling them? )

BTW: The human brain is simply not capable; nor will it EVER be capable (unless its size grows) to control a ship the size of anything larger than a Frigate

To OP's question :

Because there will never be Brains without the Brawn's.

[quote=Toshiroma McDiesel]To OP's question :

Because there will never be Brains without the Brawn's.

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?

I think this is the single most immersion-breaking element missing between the lore and actual game mechanics.

1) according to lore, ships have crews

2) gameplay does include any interaction with these crews

In my opinion it would add some spice to have crew as mandatory ship element, to be treated like race-specific fuel. You would need to "hire" (buy from the market) a certain amount of crew capable of doing crew stuffs on your ship (Gallente crew for Gallente ships). These would be seeded by NPC corporations in their space, meaning that availability of crew is dependent on the part of Empire you are. Of course you could buy crew just for sales in other regions.

In addition to market price, hiring crew (loading them in your ship) would incur Employment costs, which would depend on your standings toward the original supplier, and your security status. So in low sec, people with neg status and better standings toward pirate corps would pay less Employment costs for local crews, and in hisec the other way around. Maybe some crew would not even board your ship.

Crew would blow up with your ship, adding crew deaths and mechanics to combat is probably not realistic resource-wise.

Better immersion, an ISK sink, new trade item and not much FiS resource overhead?

This thread got me thinking about crew. Apparently I have thousands upon thousands of crewmembers in probably a hundred ships who have not even undocked in a year. Some of them are sitting in systems I have not even visited in years. What am I paying these people for? Actually, I don't seem to be paying them - how do they support themselves? Meanwhile, the poor crew in a select few ships never get a break.

Hey, I've got 30 Exotic Dancers sitting in a hanger in Mormoen. ...as well as 20 Homeless, 40 Janitors, 10 Marines, 90 Militants and 10 Tourists.

What the hell have they been up to in there for the past four years?

Brainships ftw :)

I always thought the Brainship series explained the whole human hooked up into ship and crew interaction very well. I sooo love the ship who searched, must have read it 10 times by now.

I demand that when I turn on my armor repairer a bunch of dudes in space suits dragging hoses come out of hatches on my ship and start spraying space concrete onto the damaged bits.

Also damage control modules are just a bunch of guys with fire extinguishers.

Now that's a ship repair animation I want to see!

At least on Minnie ships anyway.

I think this is the single most immersion-breaking element missing between the lore and actual game mechanics.

1) according to lore, ships have crews

2) gameplay does include any interaction with these crews

In my opinion it would add some spice to have crew as mandatory ship element, to be treated like race-specific fuel. You would need to "hire" (buy from the market) a certain amount of crew capable of doing crew stuffs on your ship (Gallente crew for Gallente ships). These would be seeded by NPC corporations in their space, meaning that availability of crew is dependent on the part of Empire you are. Of course you could buy crew just for sales in other regions.

In addition to market price, hiring crew (loading them in your ship) would incur Employment costs, which would depend on your standings toward the original supplier, and your security status. So in low sec, people with neg status and better standings toward pirate corps would pay less Employment costs for local crews, and in hisec the other way around. Maybe some crew would not even board your ship.

Crew would blow up with your ship, adding crew deaths and mechanics to combat is probably not realistic resource-wise.

Better immersion, an ISK sink, new trade item and not much FiS resource overhead?

Why would we interract with our crews? We are living gods, they are mere mortals.

This ^

Also you may pay more for faster loading, the worst your survival record the greater the incentives. The longer you have your ship the more bonuses you will get. etc...