Science & Industry

Apologies for the length. This just grew.
This will blend some RP with some real life analogies.
After reading my post, or some of it if you can't get through all of it, consider how this would change the mindset in Eve, and also make Industry a much more noble and lucrative profession.

But imagine a different Eve.

Imagine an Eve where:
Natural resources did not magically reappear to be mined infinitely. They may not be scarce, but they are finite.
Ships the size of small cities can't be built in a matter of days.
Ship salvage is actually used to make more ships, not just rigs.

I was lying in bed thinking about CCP is "Eve is real", and all the backstory that has been created, and how a lot of of it does not jive with reality.

So let's start with asteroid belts, and to some extent PI.
Let's say tomorrow CCP said, all asteroid belts no longer respawn, but have the equivalent of I dunno, 50 Hulk-Years of ore in them. 50 Hulks maxed out could mine out a belt in a year, 100 Hulks in 6 months. Then it is gone, forever.
Same with PI. Eventually a planet is drained of all raw materials, but obviously, this takes a long long time.

The ramifications: Depending on the number of resources Eve seeds the game with, miners/extractors are forced to go further and further afield to acquire the building blocks that ALL of Eve is based on. Raw materials slowly go up in price.
Risk for miners goes up as they have to venture deeper into uncharted space (low sec/nul sec/wh's) to get the materials the game needs to continue, but so does the reward.

Now, to mitigate this loss of a never-ending supply of resources, salvage on ships goes up radically, but with changes.
NPC ships no longer drop ship parts, or in fact anything that can be melted down to make stuff.
BUT, PC ships do drop stuff, LOT's of stuff. And that stuff is parts that go into the direct manufacture of ships and modules, or is used as another source pf raw materials to make something useful. Imagine how long it should take to salvage a Titan. Consider how many resources went into it, and how much comes out now.

The concept of T2 and T1 salvage may remain, but any PC ship may drop either type of salvage.
And ship wrecks don't disappear after 2 hours. They drift in space until they are picked clean by salvagers.
I would say that the value of the salvaged parts should be 75-80% of the initial value of raw materials that went into a ship.

This leads to ship/module building. Not only do ships need the minerals seen on the BPC to some extent, but stuff like Intact armour plates, shield emitters, targeting systems, whatever else you could imagine a complex machine would need.
These modules exist in game, and go into the T2 ship mfg and module mfg. But why just T2? It should be across the board for all ships and modules.

And one last thing: I find it ridiculous to think, even with tremendous automation, that a capital ship or super-cap's mfg time is measured in days, when today we measure building aircraft carriers and nuclear subs mfg time in YEARS.

Think about it.
A Nimitz class carrier has a mass of 100,000 tons.
An Aeon has a mass of 1.55 milllion metric tons, roughly 15 times larger than a Nimitz.

An Aeon can be built in roughly 3 weeks. I am assuming all capital components are being built in parallel.
If you examine the historical production rate of the U.S. carrier fleet, you see them being pumped out about one every 2 or 3 tears. The two Queen Elizabeth class carriers are looking at an 8 year build time, but only two are being built.

Yes, people will say 'Nanotechnology to build ships fast!"
But it does not seem "right" to have a ship 15 times as large and who knows how many times as complex being produced in 3 or 4% of the time of what today's technology and industry can do.

Anyway, I am in the TL/DR range.
But imagine what would happen if resources were finite (maybe not scarce) and other industry related aspects of the game were more realistic.

Thank you for your time.

Gameplay > realism.

Eventually miners will be the people who pick clean self destructed ibises and 0-skill capsules for the pitiable (but still enormously valuable) materials they contain.

Isk will be nearly valueless, as your system does nothing to combat inflation.

I like the ovall idea, but rather than completely remove respawning, make the respawning rate for more comp,ex valuable ores much much lower.
Make tracking down rogue asteroid an exciting quest. Would be a good income for new players etc.
As you say excessive mining would cause mining fleets to keep moving on and going deeper into loosed and the like.
Nice thing about it would be that that it would be an easy mechanism to alter to get the balance right

I read it and my first thought was, that would be fun, but what are the ripple effects?

A few drastic problems I see with this, is... you create a finite eve. For the first time ever, Eve has a finite point of extinction.
Granted, it may take a while, but once all of the belts are picked clean... that's it, Eve is gone.

Also, you make it almost infinitely hard for any new players to get into Eve.
No longer would someone new be able to mine in the relative safety of highsec while they figure out the basic game dynamics and forge friendships that will let them move onto the next steps.
With the rising cost of minerals, will come the rising cost of ships. This forces all new players to mine to start out (see previous statement on mining) and while some people would be okay with that, a large amount would not.

The thoughts that miners and industrialists would become even moreso financial powerhouses of Eve, I think is a slightly flawed way of thinking. I believe there would be a lot more blob fleets of cruisers and battlecruisers, with BS's becoming like caps are today...

While a fun thought of a more "realistic" Eve, I think the in game financial repercussions would be so drastic that it would make the game unplayable. Great thinking though. Fun to wonder...

Thing is, the resources would have to be ALMOST infinite, globally. (Galactically?)
There are vast amounts of resources in space. Static belts would deplete, but scannable ones would have to respawn to represent undiscovered clusters of asteroids. There's a LOT of material in space.

However, I disagree with the premise. EVE is meant to be post-scarcity, with the exception of the capsuleers providing a vast demand for ships and ammo, and also providing a vast supply of the minerals to get them. To remove the respawn and lengthen build times would give an inevitable recession, with hyper-inflation due to the sudden lack of mineral supply, and more and more ships being lost to the conflict over what minerals remain, creating even higher demand.

The economy would basically implode. CCP would make a huge amount of money, but then start making a loss as people leave in droves due to the change. People don't like change. Especially miners.

The other problem is that the current power blocks wouldn't even do anything other then farm people going into their territory. A lot of them are blue to each other so they have no reason to panic. Drone Federations will become even more powerful then they are now.

I will not indulge you. This idea is a direct path to the end of EvE. Finite resources = game over, there isn't much to say about it.