EVE Fiction

Correct. The capsuleer only replaces the bridge crew, i.e., the crew specifically responsible for relaying information from other portions of the ship to the captain, and then relaying the captain's orders to other portions of the ship.The remaining crew primarily concerns themselves with maintenance, upkeep, and mid-battle damage control.



Yes, when docked in any given station a capsuleer can easily leave (or 'decant') from his capsule and walk around in the station, or take a transport planetside. An overview of this kind of interaction can be found in this evelopedia article, but one constant to keep in mind is that a capsuleer is fantastically rich compared to many of those he will meet in a station: 10,000 ISK is the rough equivalent of the savings a family may accrue in the entire lifetime of a given family member.

Ships equipped to extract the capsule and allow the capsuleer to leave his pod while still onboard the ship are referred to as "Cross-capsule variant" ships; these are post-market modifications and extremely rare, not to mention difficult to do on any smaller hull.


The capsuleer directly controls the various components of the ship, which means the process occurs much more quickly than if it was by human interaction. This is one of the primary advantages a capsuleer has over a traditionally-helmed ship: Normally, a sensor officer would read his sensors, identify a threat, say "Captain, asteroids at X position ahead of us present a navigational risk"; the captain then says "Navigation, adjust heading by X amount to avoid them, and the helmsman/navigational officer would then adjust the course. In the time this has happened, the capsuleer would have noted the threat, adjusted the course, run a local scan, and shot off a communication to his buddy nearby.

Another important thing to note is that on small frigates, nearly all of the crew may be 'bridge crew', meaning the capsuleer may replace nearly (if not entirely) all the normal crew.



It has never been definitively stated, but yes, it would appear that the drones are controlled by some form of onboard AI. Fighters an Fighter-bombers have small numbers (1-2) of human crew aboard; these can actually be seen if you look carefully at the model.

It is important to note that if drones sometimes seem unintelligent, that's because they are: Learning, adaptive drones have been banned by CONCORD after early experiments with them accidentally produced the Rogue Drone threat.



No worries - EVE's lore is huge, deep, and amazingly complex. We all have questions at first!

http://www.eveonline.com/creations/fiction/khadrea/ Perhaps the most recent, presumably canon statement on relation of ISK to System or planet currency.



As for the frigate crew complement, there's this; http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Item_Database:Ships:Frigates#Physical_Features

And this fairly old chronicle, "the war drones on"

There's an old news article about the value of ISK. I think someone linked it recently on this forum, but it might've been on backstage. I'll go look.

EDIT: Found it. The relevant portion is quoted below:


Also, here's another article that doesn't give any explicit numbers but is still relevant.

The chronicles are official, but the frigates mentioned might be little more than upgraded fighters, as I read it. The point is, ships have certainly changed since then.
IRL there are ships with thousands of people on board now, while a couple hundred years ago, that was not possible.

Either way, to my knowledge, the New Eden crew guidelines are still the most recent official publication on the matter, apart from some discussion on survival rates, and no apparent misinterpretation of those guidelines by a wiki-worker is going to make the frigate page more official.

About the currency:
Teinyhr: You offer no official source for your assumption. Amamake credits could be worth 3,600 Matari Credits, for all I know. On earth there are also currencies which are in a 30000:1 rating with others. You can say that they are worth 3 times as much as the USD, but for I know they have the value of Weimar republic Marks.
Morwen: Thanks, I had forgotten about that one.
I have to say though, that an avarage is likely severely reduced by large amount of people barely making enough to sustain themselves. On earth a lot of people earn <1 USD a year.
I think that for someone with wealth comparable to western middle class, 10,000 ISK may well be only a year salary. Keep in mind that even rookie capsuleers are very rich compared to that figure, as they can earn several millions in a few weeks easily.

Frigates mostly only have the pod afaik. However the Kestrel has a few crew on board for whatever reason. Frigates would not have been fighters as they are about equal to a 747-400 in size.

Even battleships are highly automated though when you look at some random data and see crew quotes, an EVE battleship has comparable crew numbers to an Iowa Class from the WW2 era of usage of the hull. so for ships that reach kilometers in length 5-7k crew is actually pretty good.

Clear Skies is not an accurate depiction of a capsuleer's life, no. It's a pop culture film; perhaps the best analogy is that Clear Skies is to the actual capsuleer's life what the "Transformers" movies were to actual military operations.