EVE Fiction

First answer: It's cheap. The Big 4 empires all use other types of armor plating in their ship construction (which we see as components used in T2 ship production. Steel plating is likely a holdover used in vessels where sheer absolute protection is not as important as cost concerns. Examples include civilians ships and pirate or rebel vessels constructed with limited resources.

Second answer: "Steel plating" does not simply mean a slab of steel. When we think of "steel plating", we often think of something like Rolled Homogeneous Armor (RHA), which is nothing more than a plate of steel formed using specific processes and composition. In contrast, armor plating in EVE is constructed of multiple layers with various types of anti-damage membranes, nanite pumps for armor repair and containment, etc. Building the majority of the plating out of steel does not change this at all. In particular T2 plating is, by definition, constructed with Morphite included in the formula of the armor plate to give it a vast boost in strength.

Not to mention, do we really know what their definition of steel is? Could have anything mixed into it by then.

Steel is an immensely versatile and useful material. I think we can reasonably assume that the metallurgy of a future where spaceships can literally reconstruct themselves from burning wreckage to full functionality again, where kilometer-long battleships take only half an hour to build and where nanotechnology can repair heat-damaged intricate equipment in a matter of seconds might be able to do some things with good steel that we can't envision.

steel is, after all, only an alloy of iron and carbon. What if the carbon was in the form of, say, a graphene mesh? Nanotubes? Fullerenes? For all we know a nanotube-carbon steel cable only as thick as an elastic band could lift a tank. one millimeter of graphene-laminate steel could be equivalent to ten times that thickness of our very best steel.

Don't discount just how much you can accomplish with carbon, let alone carbon alloyed with metallic iron.

I always explain the minerals with the long time New Eden has been isolated from us and how much time has passed since our times. Both cases would most likely transform common minerals we know into something completely incomprehensible for us, due to language drift.

Also confusingly, some Eve minerals like Pyerite do exist. CCP likes to throw curveballs, apparently.

i'd like to see us come up with an acronym for the latter, like we do with EANM or CDFE

Not to mention that once you start playing with whimsical materials like neutronium you begin to divorce the vocabulary of your fiction from common speech to the nigh useless realm of technobabble.

As a total side note, it might be that a relatively simple alloy resembling steel (perhaps itself a loan word from the early Earth settlers) is used in Amarrian spaceship design but has been supplanted by more advanced T2 armor manufacturing. This would be similar to the way that the alloy used in traditional Katanas is of an inferior quality to Western alloys of the time but was brought to a similar standard through extensive labor on the part of the swordmaker. The Amarr Empire could have lagged behind in metallurgy by means of the simple fact that through a huge expenditure of physical labor they were able to change the low-grade alloy into a usable product without having the knowledge of how to better refine the alloy chemically.

don't forget hope.

Do we know what their definition of IS is?

So THAT'S what the problem is. This always happens to me, usually just after I lock up another player. The tritanium must be further weakened by targeting system activation or something.

And there was me thinking I was just bad at PvP. :)

I could have sworn that Tritanium was only unstable inside an atmosphere.