EVE Fiction

Not talking officer mods - those seem obvious. Rich bastard NPC pays for serious custom tech placed in their ships and you just happen to find it intact in the wreckage.

What I mean is the Meta 1 thru Meta 4 items. Better than any of the T1 stuff we can make, yes (generally) not as good as the T2 stuff either. In term of lore I have to ask: Where does all this crap come from, anyway?

Although I suppose you could lump a lot of it together, the thing is that I don't see anything in the lore pointing a finger and saying "That is where the (random pirate faction) build the 50,000,000 ships that exploded daily and all the stuff that goes into them. Also, none of it is really standardized so the same ship might be carrying around anything from Meta 1 to Meta 4 (but never T1 or T2) modules - even though they never actually use any of this stuff themselves."

In the X2/X3 series there were sectors with hidden pirate & Xenon bases/shipyards where they would spawn from before heading out to wreck havoc. And you could, if you had a big enough fleet, smash those bases to keep them from spawning for a while (the bases would eventually respawn themselves but whatever).

Yes I understand the "game mechanics" argument but I'm trying to reconcile that into lore and a suspension of disbelief. Why do they drop modules that don't exist on any blueprint anywhere? Why do they carry ammunition, drones and gear that they don't actually use themselves?

Give me a believable story, please.

In some cases, they can be easily explained as common modifications of an existing base design; for instance, an Mega Modulated Pulse Energy Beam I might be a standard MPL with a shorter, but more intense pulse time for each "shot"; the shorter pulse period allows for faster cooling, in turn allowing for more more rapid shots and lowered energy use per shot, etc. A meta ECM array might be an ECM with a slightly tweaked broadcasting formula, or an enhanced feedback system to more quickly shift to an appropriate jamming spectrum in response to hostile sensors attempting to work around a currently-jammed spectrum.

As capsuleers, the only base designs we have easy access to are the "T1 Meta 0" modules, since the BPOs are freely sold to us. "But Esna," I can hear asked. "Why can't we just reverse-engineer the designs and make our own?" Well, we actually sort of can - in fact, we can improve them slightly with some datacores and other components thrown in; this is basically what the Invention process does.

We are better at invention than the various factions.

Manufacturer "defects" that actually prove to be awesome...
Specialized versions that are heavily patented and not available for public use
Or my all time favorite Space-Wizards did it