EVE General Discussion

Why are the pirate factions in EVE the designers of the highest tech ships in the game, while the IMPERIAL navies are only able to design okay-ish vessels (or downright terrible ones like the Caldari Navy Osprey)?

When you think of pirates, you'd think of criminals living on the outskirts of society, scavenging for whatever they can, not the leaders in technology and industry.

That would be like if the space program was headed by the New York Crips or if Somali rebels invented the bullet train.

Silly. Can someone explain this in a way that I can reconcile with the game's fluff?

Explain it to me, I'm lazy. Is society really that terrible that the categorically best scientists fled to join anarchists while the dumb ones stayed behind?

- Sansha was a weapons dealer anyway
- Angels got their tech from the Jove after moving in on what used to be Jove space (read the Machariel description)
- Serpentis CEO made his corporate empire from the combat booster industry, wouldn't be surprising if he has a well funded weapons lab as well as the fact that he hired the angels as corporate body guards (which is why the daredevil is featured in the Serpentis line-up but is obviously Angel in design)

I dunno about Blood Raiders or Guristas tho
Likely hood is they stole it from the Amarr and "The Rabbit" has similar resources like the Serpentis CEO.

But they also have CONCORD breathing over them and other political matters to fund. I can imagine there are anti-militaristic lobbyists within each empire. The pirate groups and no such regulation and can dump as much as they want into weapons with no restrictions as to how they get ti done. The empires likely have somewhat strict guidelines as to how certain specifications must be followed (Minmatar: "Not nearly enough duct tape for protocol!!")

Pure man power.

Look how many pirate NPC's are killed every minute of everyday. Billions have died and they just keep coming.

And lol @ gurista tech superiority. All they did was put missiles on the Vexor and Dominix.

The way I see it, the pirate factions can afford to have what would normally be extremely dysfunctional socieites. The only reason that North Korea, for example, maintains it's absolutely massive military force relative to it's population, is that it's population is left to starve and only barely survives through world aid. I think of the pirate factions as many small empires held together by the iron will of warlords or in the case of the Sansha, through literal mind control. They don't have to worry about representing the people or managing their markets or anything like that. They can focus all their economic might, much of which is funded by stealing from larger empires, into military enterprises.

The US pours an awful amount of money into defense each year, but still, proportional to their overall income, it's not like they're gutting every other aspect of their society in order to remain militarily strong. There would be a revolt if that happened. Sorry, no institutions, public roads, cops, or firefighters, or anything, we need to make more tanks and research better guns. People: lolno, kick government out. Now, let's take a Blood Raider warlord presiding over an asteroid belt worth of small bases and about 100k people, most of whom are pirates themselves, he can afford to direct the funds from piracy wherever he likes, within reason. As long as his men stay paid and he covers basic necessities like shelter and food, the rest of the money made from piracy goes into making them even deadlier pirates. He buys better ships, or recruits renegade scientists, bribes Empire generals to switch sides and give intel, invents deadly new weapons, and so on.

I think that the most convincing arguments are that the navies are subject to cost-benefit analysis; and that their engineering is focused on actual advancement (t3, capitals) rather than pimping out their warships with custom modifications.

Makes sense to me.

A large company must manage lots of people and document the crap out of everything to keep everyone on the same page. It must also follow whatever government regulations are in place for its activities. It generally also must turn a profit.

A large corporation must answer to its shareholders or board or some other extra group of interested parties.

A government military organization has to answer to all sorts of incompetent middle managers and other branches of government, none of whom were bright enough to obtain private-sector jobs.

A pirate organization can do whatever it wants, when it wants, not tell anyone about it and steal what it needs to fund the project.

Which one do you think will turn out a few excellent specialized ships in the least time? :)

If you want badly-made ships constructed by scavengers, fly Minmatar.