EVE Fiction

I was going to start working on a story of me and a friends journey through New Eden and I wonder how many crew members does an ORCA hold. I have checked everywhere and was unable to find this info. Also if anyone has any links to sites that have this type of information that would be much appreciated. Thank you and from what I have read you all are great I hope to read more of your works.

Yes I have I was wondering where the orca would fit as it wouldn't require as much crew as a combat ship I would think.

I will hijack this thread to add that CCP should finally create a proper crew system within the EVE client.

I would be satisfied even with baby steps, like just adding the crew numbers into attributions info panel.

Don't get me started on the capsuleer concept, I hate it so much.

And as far as ORCA numbers go, I would say 5000 would be a reasonable number.

If there was any valid reason to keep living crew on a capsuleer ship, it would logically defeat the whole purpose of having capsuleers in the first place: not needing crew.

If you still have a justified need for a crew, regardless of a capsuleer's ability to single-handedly have absolute control over an entire spaceship through simple thoughts, then capsuleers are at best, completely irrelevent, or at worst, a major economic liability and a gigantic waste of resources.

In my opinion, the less crew, if none at all, the better. Humans are not exactly well adapted to living in zero-gravity, in vacuum or in constant exposure to deadly cosmic radiation.

If you can almost instantly remotely transfer a spaceship pilot's consciousness at the very moment of death to a clone that is light years away, surely you can just remote-control the darn thing and save yourself a lot of trouble.

There is a reason why, IRL, we stopped actively trying to send astronauts to outer space after the idiotic chest-bumping competition that was the cold war and decided to send automated probes instead. They have less chances of dying, are immensely more mass-efficient (the whole not needing bulky and heavy life support systems part), and are thus much cheaper to replace if destroyed by a stray grain of sand going at relativistic speeds.

If one person can replace the entire bridge crew, then the rest of the crew could easyly be replaced in the same manner, with the essential functions like emergency hull repairs or cargo distribution and management being automated.

I mean, we pretty much have the technology to build fully remote-controlled sea-faring warships right now (just take a look at the US arsenal ships project). Why wouldn't we be able to do even less automation with far-future technology? I'm all for unions protecting workers and their jobs, but this would really be pushing it.

In EVE, even a frigate with a capsuleer system still needs crew (1-3 people). And I'm damn happy it still needs. EVE is incredibly bad at making a bond with your ingame character/ship, which I consider a crucial element for your immersion experience. You fly ships with the same desings anyone else can fly around you and your ship is usually blown up in few days later anyway. Where is the connection you can create with your character like in other games? Nowhere. No connection. You are connected to a texture of your random ship anyone can fly (some ship skins may help a bit in the future, though) and to your name in a chat.

Now, removing crew would kill any immersion of that completely. Flying few kilometers long spaceships just with an egg? No, thank you! That's an absolutely horrible vision and I praise the gods CCP is clever enough to never do this. In fact, I hope they will do the crew system soon. They really need to work on Walking in Stations, Walking in Spaceships and other similiar stuff again and hopefully completely abandon the egg concept

I'm just saying. Getting rid of the capsuleer concept and re-focusing on crew, and, as you said, on stories and resolving problems around hiring and flying with your crew, would greatly add new immersion flavor to the game. Now you can have this only in your head. I would prefer to have it directly within the game. Would as well greatly decrease the number of ignorants thinking there is no crew on any spaceship.

If you assume that the orca is a bit bigger than a standard battleship, and a tad smaller than a standard carrier, and assume that ORE uses a lot of the same technology as Gallente, and therefore would have a larger percentage of automation like the Gallente ships, You can probably approximate the number of crew from that chart at around 325ish when piloted with a capuleer, 650ish when not.

I actually somewhat agree with you on this! Having both crew and pod on the same ship makes no sense. And I like my lore to make sense. So, either pod and no crew, or no pods at all.

On a spaceship, a lot of the maintenance needs are related with the presence of a crew in the first place. Remove the crew and you remove some of the more important needs for maintenance. Unless you have a crew, and thus valuable air reserves to preserve, a hole that goes through the entire hull without hitting critical systems or fuel tanks doesn't need to be patched in less than a minute. It may not even need to be repaired at all in the short-term.

As for the "manual labor costs less than automation" argument, it doesn't make any more sense in the context. On earth, outsourcing the manufacturing to cheap labor in poorer countries works because the planet provides the most important living requirements basically for free. You don't pay for breathing non-toxic air or for having the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field protect you. In space, breathable air, drinkable water and protection from cosmic radiation all come at a cost. And that's just the bare minimum to have a living crew, not to have one with good enough morale to work at peak efficiency.

The life support systems, food, water, air and radiation protection needed to keep a human crew alive on a spaceship will always be extremely more expensive than replacing all that equipment with an equal weight's worth of automated systems that cut the middle man and directly does the human crew's job more efficiently, constantly and while needing ridiculously less maintenance than the life support systems needed for a small crew. Not to mention that any life-support system designed for long-term operation in space is extremely complex and still rather sensitive. Failure rates will be much more common, and risky, on life support systems than on ship-maintenance automated systems. So you'll need the complex, heavy, bulky and fragile life-support to be redundant, doubling the disadvantage.

Either pods do work as they should and make crews entirely obsolete on capsuleer ships, or pod technology doesn't work and there is no clear advantage compared to the state of current technology in modern-day real-world wealthy countries.

So yeah, if we are to have crew anyway, I'd rather see a complete ret-con of the entire technology that is the whole premise of the game than having both a pod and a hugely wasteful crew on board. The pod-less crew only makes sense if it is necessary, and it is only necessary if there is no pod.

Then again, generally, the only valid reason to even bother having a human-piloted spaceships in the first place is that nobody wants to hear the life and times of an automated shipboard computer without anthropomorphing it to the point of making it basically human anyway. Humans are self-conscious animals, we care the most about what we can relate to. Unfortunately for fiction writers and scientists alike, there isn't much that we can relate to in space.