EVE Fiction

Except when your ship explodes and your escape pod gets blown up, so you die.

Yes, I've read lots of inventive ways of dealing with this very real narrative issue you bring up. Some of them are in the EON fiction contest entry page here

Or... ya could've made it an implant from the beginning like Dust soldiers now have to explain their numerous resurrections. Like I mentioned earlier that will presumably be the case if you implement EVA's in the future. Still no final death if you get stuck in a room with radiation leakage... or will there?¡?

The cloneage I can heartily live with, not much any other way around final death than that. It's the disconnect from commanding a ship that's got me all frowny :-(

Its better lore than having hundreds of thousands of highly trained, yet completely unpaid and un-mourned slaves blown up for giggles each time a miner is ganked and the pirate concorded for lulz.

Reduced manning is the miltary's future in RL and makes more sense to cut out the wasted resources of crew training and replacment, ship lodgings, simulated gravity, etc. The inefficiency of having to bark orders and then wait for a response would be inferior to the instant 'think and act' that pods would enable.

I think the pod was probably one of Eve's greatest part of the lore.

yk

Ok, firstly, in the Clear Skies series the crew of the "Clear Skies" aren't capsuleers, so of course they're in not in a "pod-of-goo". (Also, there is planetary motion now, how have you not noticed?).

Likewise, you don't need to change the canon to make something acceptable. Just use your imagination. EVE universe is setup to be expansive and less discriminate in it's lore propagation. For example, I like to differ from the norm when it comes to the pod as well. What I like to imagine is that I'm in a prototype capsule which uses a kind of sonic equilibirum buffering (or whatever technobabble that I haven't thought through enough yet) to keep me safe from the rigors of space, FTL travel and wormholes (i.e, stargates) but allow me to keep half my clothes on plus speeding up process of leaving the capsule. Still gotta be hooked up to the pod Matrix-style in order for you to function as an elite starship pilot/captain regardless of "goo" or not. I do like to think that my ships are also modified or an alternate hull model with built in pod gantry/access port to allow me to leave it and enter the decks like a normal human. I usually like to imagine I'm doing that during long waits like on ambush ops (blah blah gate camping) or during horribly boring mining. Also, on the bridge of my larger vessels (frigates don't require any crews since they can be handled like "heavy fighters" when operated by Empyreans' elite capabilities) I imagine there is a command chair but it has built in holoprojectors that display a volumetric avatar of me in a way of making my crew feel a little comfortable taking orders from me rather than the disembodied "god voice" as per standard.

Anyway, I could ramble on about the many things that aren't solidly explained in EVE (I figure that's for a reason) so I like to adjust things in my mind from my own imaginative benefit.

If you fly a titian its more along the lines of i sit here and am a jump gate.

Here's an idea - instead of all players being defined as capsuleers that spend the majority of their lives inside a pod (and thus creating the bespoke issue), how about:

Pilots in New Eden that prefer the solitary, disembodied sense of being in-pod, of having their ship become an extension of their selves, and who prefer to spend 99% of their 'lives' (whatever that is) within the pod, are referred to euphemistically as 'capsuleers' by other pilots.

Pilots that choose to sit in leather chairs and command ships by barking orders to crew members, who prefer the important comfort of interacting with other people, who think that group decision-making is important for piloting starships, and only evacuate into their pods when their ships go kablooey - are not.

Hocus pocus, problem solved. Heck, there's enough material in the previous two sentences to explore for years.

Shameless ps - read my EON fanfic entry!