EVE Fiction

EVE Online has rather realistic approach on physics, but there are a lot of things that CCP hasn't unveiled us yet. I thought these might be rather interesting topics for open discussion, and I'd like to hear what the community thinks :) To mention some of the most relevant ones:

Eve ships are immensely powerful instruments of harmageddon. What are the power sources like? Probably matter-antimatter
reactors and if so, how they've managed to solve the antimatter containment issue? Eve ships are able to withstand
multimegaton strikes on their shields and armor belts, and keeping the antimatter contained at all times must be a high
priority in the ship designs. And how is antimatter generated in the first place in the New Eden?

Another major issue is the heat generated by the reactors and shipboard systems within the hulls. There must be some rather
exotic methods to vent out this excess heat and keep the crews from getting cooked inside their own hulls. However I havent
been able to spot any heatsinks or other forms of heat dissipation on any of the ship designs.

How the shield systems work? In Star Trek, shields are graviton fields that form a bubble around the ship, and this shield
is at alternating distance from the hull, and has certain frequency and nutation, and these keep constantly changing in the
most modern starship designs. Eve online shields seem transparent, and ships only have one shield grid, due to gameplay
mechanics. Having to maintain several shield segments would add unnecessary complication to gameplay, imho. We do know that Eve shields can be augmented with shield hardeners to increase their resistances to various damage types, a feature not
present in most scifi franchices, if in any.

How the armor and hull repair units work, are they nanite-based? The amount of nanites required for fast armor repair would
be huge, and they'd need to be stored somewhere safe, right?

And then the guns. Why space age guns have so epic tracking issues? They shoot projectiles at astronomical speeds, and
typical fighting distances are only tens of kilometers at most. They shouldnt miss that much on these distances. Then again,
this is probably another game mechanics issue.
There's a lot more to this than these few things. Gun, energy weapon and missile mechanisms are all open for discussion in larger detail! This is an endless pit. So grab your bottle of Quafe Ultra and share your thoughts :)

It's a science fiction computer game. The armor repair modules repair your ship by telling a server in Iceland to add a number to the value for your current armor hit-points. They exist because they make game-play interesting. If we knew how such a thing would work in real life, we would have real life armor repairers on real life weapons platforms.

Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

so, a space wizard did it.

For real space physics, check out the old Jumpgate MMO. Zero gravity environment and no air resistance, so momentum carries moving objects forward for ages. Pretty tricky maneuvering your ship, when it keeps going with virtually no decleration after you turn off the gas. Fun game, for that part only. (Not speaking heresy against EVE here-- other than the physics simulator, Jumpgate's a crude, simplistic little shooter thing compared to EVE).

That would imply that the universe has a center... which is wrong. The common model of the universe as an expanding balloon has its merits, but in that case it's simply flawed, as there are no "boundaries" per se. Space is bent into itself in a way. That means, set out to travel in what you see as a straight line. Barring course corrections due to obstacles on your way forward, you'd arrive at the point where you started sooner or later.

I think the best analogy would be an old video game running on the good old Atari console... Those games having a single screen as a playground where you enter from the right if you move out to the left. The playing ground does have a definite size (one screen) but no limits and therefore no center.


I think it's easier to say that the ship's systems automat(g)ically translate vectored flight mechanics to a more intuitive handling and that there are other limits on the ship's maximum speed. Maybe the ship's warp drive doesn't react well to being accelerated to relativistic speeds because of stability issues... whatever.


In a nutshell, EvE physics are quite far from being realistic in favour of playability, but it puts much strain on fiction writers to explain the discrepancies.

Though "up and down" may be the easiest to explain. Declare three solar systems as fixed points in a coordinate system, that's all you need. There you have two vectors (AB and AC), define the cross product of these vectors as "up".

And the ships aligning themselves to the given "up" orientation may be just a convenience feature of the ship's nagivation systems to save the pilots from the disorienting effects of space travel. There may even be some social implications connected to that (like being common courtesy to use the same "up" direction when meeting each other in space). Though it would be an idea to make it possible to switch it off, so that a ship remains in the same orientation and tilt when just stopping.