EVE Fiction

What about capsuleers? They're in a pod; I'm sure they would be shielded from radiation of all kinds...

"Due to recent freelance capsuleer actions against the established empires, CONCORD has reduced the maximum possible jump range for freelance-captained vessels to 5 Light Years."

I like the OP's reasoning, but Esna is probably more on the nail of what CCP is going for.

They should not force lore for all the game changes, some of them fit in "it always been like that" category

Side effects of Using Jump Drives (and meeting bad spirits eye to eye in the dimmension between the jump locations, as some Amarr prophet said) settled in.

Then I guess the only option is to declare war on CONCORD.

Bad idea. Real bad idea.
This is what happened last year around the same time, when a few hundred capsuleers attacked a Concord : Capsuleers fail to organize a gank on Concord

I like your explanation regarding the ice (also fits in with how ice anoms shrank), but i have a suggestion for a change to the latter part regarding the fatigue itself.

Instead of only causing blasts of radiation in the ship, it also damaged the jump drive itself using impure fuels as the catalyst. This caused a continuous degradation of the effectiveness and integrity of jump drives being used, even to the point of catastrophic failure. Faced with increasing difficulty in finding enough fuels to power the many jump drives of their massive caravans, Thukker engineers attempted to scale down the current drives and took techniques from the drives on black ops battleships and designed a smaller, much more compact and durable jump drive. Retro-fitting the existing designs in order to make them still function on the impure fuels came at the exspense of maximum range and new procedures regarding timings of jumps. Since the drive was reduced in power, making a wormhole large enough for the massive capitals, from a smaller drive, caused immense stress on the drive itself, though not nearly as dangerous as the original drives. This creates a situation that makes distance and the wait-period after a jump a new challenge to overcome for fleet commanders. Another, unforseen side effect of the smaller drives was that ship captains found they no longer exceeded the threshold that stargates could accommodate, as is already done by black ops ships.

As the thukker tribe began to implement this new design on their fleets, other empires caught on and elected to use it in order to extend the dwindling life-span of their existing capital fleet.

Once Outer Ring Excavations got a hold of this design, they made improvements to it as they implemented it into the existing Rorqual design. A break through in development came through when the engineers used a combination of existing alloys and metals used in the industrial core to compress ore. They implemented it on to the Rorqual and were pleased to discover a massive reduction in fatigue accrued by the jump drive, but despite their best efforts, they could not get the range to extend beyond its reduced state (*subject to change). This design was kept under tight security and is now a very closely held secret.

When the empires tried to apply this technique to jump freighters they found the already compact drives to be very accepting of the changes and it gave jump freighters a slightly reduced range and a naturally low rate of fatigue accrual. The actual philosophies surrounding how this combination of techniques worked so well, is still not fully understood and is being researched thoroughly in hopes of future design improvements.

Ok so that part of the lore is done. As to why it doesn't apply to wormholes:
Wormholes work similarly to stargates, as they use as much of the existing gravitational forces (hence the odd positioning of some gates) in order to maintain their form, which allows for more efficient use of them and the ability to use gates to increase their power to allow larger objects through (the previous limit was never the size, but the on board jumpdrive interference, which was not experienced on JF or BLOPs due to a more compact design. And as we see with wormholes, squeezing large ships through them causes massive stress and can even collapse them.

What do you think?

E:On that note, with existing BLOPS drives that were experiencing a similar problem (albeit on a smaller scale due to nature of covert drives) Engineers elected to slightly increase and reinforce the jump drives on the ships, which gave them slight increase in range, and a nice reduction in fatigue relative to normal jump drives.