Player Features and Ideas Discussion

TL:DR at bottom

The whole in a pod thing kind of annoys me. It removes part of the dignity of being the Captain, or whatever, of a ship.

Then there is the issue of how the responses are supposed to be instant due to the capsuleer controlling the ship from the pod, but aren't due to lag.

Solution, drop the "pilot in a pod controls the ship" lore. Responses aren't instant like they should be, and ships do have crews (more on crews later), which would be kind of awkward dealing with the captain who sits in a fish bowl.

extended solution, lore wise, Me in my ship, walking, talking, giving orders to my crew. Their response time would explain the delay between when i tell my ship to shoot, and when it actually does.
As far as the pod goes, ESCAPE POD. With a god-like ass of a captain, seems reasonable that he would have his own special pod and willingness to ditch the crew for the safety of it.


Lastly, a bit on crew,
My dream is to have real crews, rather then the dirty secret that crews are now. They would be produced by PI. A dev mentioned something about this, but for the industry crews, ugh, the last place that anyone cares about for having a crew (which should be renamed to "unions"). Anyway, t1 PI production would give you sailors (or whatever you want the rank to be), t2 PI gives you chiefs ( senior enlisted, or whatever), t3 PI gives you junior grade officers, and t4 gives to commanders (second in command). Add in various perks for crew and what not, im sure those things can be argued over. The perks could be whatever, probably things like the genolution implants do. Unfortunately the one perk that all well trained crews should offer, reduced response time, is off the table due to RL technology. We just have to turn blind eye to that for another ten or so years.

TL:DR
When I fly my ships, I walk and talk, and give orders to my crew face to face. When poo hits the fan I be sure to hope in my personal escape pod and wish my crew the best. No green go for me.

Or possibly, just possibly, that delay is the time taken for the guns mechanicals to actually execute the order. When you consider the size of our guns (BS Arty shoot CARS!) the response times we get are phenomenal.

Then consider that if we weren't in a pod, everything would take twice as long and be half as effective.

You are the captain of your ship... and your crew is robotic and commanded by advanced cybernetics. Think about it... the frigate is like a yaris... the titan and carriers are like SUV's... everyone gets their own ship... no need for a crew when the entire thing can be controlled from the fish bowl. :)

When you start up a program on your computer, does it start up instantly? Even with a SSD and highly optimized tweaks there is a slight delay in computer response.

Hell... even in our own bodies cannot respond "instantly." There is always a delay between what we see, process, and act on. The real question is, how fast is our processing and acting speed in relation to what we are acting upon.


Lore-wise, the pod is a device that drastically increases efficiency... allowing us to more or less circumvent the need for a traditional command structure (we give the orders directly instead). But, as I said above, no matter how powerful a computer is there will always be a response delay as the computer itself can be the "bottleneck."

Even still... with a capsule we can operate a ship with much less crew than would normally be required... cutting down on cost, potential loss of life, and human error not our own.

But, we still need a crew for maintaining our equipment (except for some basic Tech 1 frigates).



I can agree that adding in "crews" as an item would be cool... but I would not really support crews as anything beyond that. There are already a plethora of items, implants, mods, and rigs that affect ship stats. Adding another one "just cause" would just increase the complaints that "PvP costs too much" or "there is too much needless complexity" and "this is widening the gap between vets and newbies."



You are free to roleplay however you wish. But the lore is what CCP says it is. And they generally stick pretty close to it. Hell, they sometime balance their ships according to it (T2 resistances anyone?).

That issue was fixed from harvesting sleeper implants and the creation of dust soldiers.


But still no. Screw having to buy crews.

Also our brains are far more complex than those ground hugging mud-monkeys. You could probably get away with a photocopier and a bacon slicer for their brains...

As can I.

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