EVE Fiction

Sansha's Nation, have an argument that they make, that "There is no death in Nation". Persons fighting against Nation forces, may be asked "Why do you continue to spend the lives of your crew in such a futile endeavour?".

Other factions too, have a similar point of view. Even normal conflicts between e.g. rival militia forces. Same argument: "why do you continue to spend the lives of your crew in this way?"

To have a cloned crew, and thus to say "they're clones, your argument is invalid", ends any kind of RP that could have been created from the encounter.

For e.g. Amarr/Minmatar, then arguments such as "they died in the service of the Lord", or "it is better to die free than live in chains", that discussion will not happen when the crews are clones.

There is then, no possibility of RP involving a discussion of the different character's viewpoints. No reason to try and justify one viewpoint over another.

Example: Sansha. "There is No death in Nation", the Nation pilot can say this, and talk about the wastefulness of capsuleers and their crew, and the anti-Nation pilot can argue about the importance of the human spirit, about how some things are more important than life or death (amusing though that is for a capsuleer), and so on.

But if the crew is all clones, then, that RP will not happen. There's no need for a character to ever have to think about and justify their ideology. "They're clones, they can be replaced", and the character doesn't ever need to think about what they are trying to achieve.

It ends discussions before they even begin. "Can we justify this loss of life?", "Yes. They're clones", "Oh ok".



Cloned crews also act as a big slap in the face to all the players who have written on the IGS, or other venues, about how the loss of a ship and crew affected them, how it forced them to confront their core beliefs, and justify what they fight for.

clone crews say to those people that they're an idiot, for not cloning their crew.



Then there is the technical aspect of roleplaying that someone has a clone crew. Clones require many things: scientists, biomass, large sums of ISK. To have a cloning program in place for that crew, requires a lot of effort. If that effort is not simulated (as much as can be done within game mechanics), then to state that a person has a cloned crew is insulting to the RP of anyone that does go to the effort of simulating the things they do.

E.g. someone that goes to the effort of buying or generating lots of biomass from Planetary Interaction, has lots of Scientist passenger items, and spends some ISK on npc goods that they then throw away, to simulate a cloning program for a ship crew, is backing up their stated RP with ingame actions.

Someone that just says "my crew are cloned", with no ingame actions to back that up, is insulting the people that do back their RP up with ingame activity. If a battleship takes hundreds of millions of ISK to make up a cloned crew, then it is insulting to other players if there is no expenditure of hundreds of millions of ISK.


It is having your cake and eating it.




Escape pods do exist in the background. Though they're not always effective. And not everyone gets to them.

I suppose you could have some kind of "Emergency brain scanner" helmet thing for high value personnel, but, and this is important, it would not be 100%. There would inevitably be accidents, malfunctions, and other calamities, so not everyone would survive.



As is, outside the capsule, death is kind of still death. It was one of the reasons why Walking In Stations was frowned upon by some people. The issue of "veteran pilot stabbed in brain by newb with spoon" was a thing that people considered meant there would never be combat in stations.


The only common ground for players is to proceed on the basis that crew die in significant proportions, and that pilots need to be able to think of why they consider these deaths necessary (or have an interesting RP mental anguish over it).

Now I'm suddenly interested in seeing how many billions of assets you have to back up your IC claims.

If the best argument you can come up with is to passive aggressively call me out on the use of the word angst, I think we're probably done here.

clones clones clones! climbing out the walls!

I don't have a scooby doo, it's all up in the air. Certainly the reasoning behind the Space Cows project was to have them pilot barges so that people aren't exposed to the Terrible Secret of Space.

I liked the bit where everyone is assumed to be a callous cheapskate. Woot!
do people still say "woot" ? or is that old hat.

Technically she attributed the words "butthurt" and "angst" to herself, when regarding what she doesn't like to roleplay specifically. In any case, this thread is quickly getting derailed into semantics games by the apparently unresolvable differences between you two.

Would ship crews have access to cloning services? If they were paid enough, certainly, I don't see why not. Cloning is available to people other than capsuleers or DUST mercs, after all; wealthy enough individuals can buy their way into immortality. I can definitely see a capsuleer wanting to preserve their best-performing crewmembers. Why hire a new Chief Engineer when you can keep the reliable engineer you've had for the past year or two? Of course it would boil down to questions of morality for some capsuleers, or simply cost-benefit analyses for others. It really depends on the character and their own set of values.

The cost of cloning would certainly make it a bit of a problem for the idea of using clone crews. Of course the chronicles don't give a very good impression of shipboard life in EVE anyway... Year long contracts, small living quarters, lack of human interaction besides with people in your section.

It's not exactly the best career out there. I'd think one of the few benefits of working on a capsuleer ship would be that it wouldn't be as crowded with better living conditions basically... but the risk of death would be much higher. I think I don't have more than one or two ships that's lasted long enough that a crewman managed to walk off the ship after their year long contract ended.

For RPing purposes, I wouldn't think the Sansha's Players wouldn't have the biggest problem with the loss of life for example. As I wonder how much life there are in slaves hooked up to an artificial computer network... Who knows, they may survive as a form of infomorph within Sansha's artificial reality.