Intergalactic Summit

It may sound cold, but you'll grow out of it.

My crews are employees of Lai Dai Research Spacelane Security, and are treated with the same dignity and respect that any Lai Dai employee deserves. I don't get to interact with them as much as I would like, and my memory is tremendously shoddy, but I try to make sure that they are treated fairly and enjoy the fruits of their labour. We hold a monthly dinner and meeting, and I will visit the break room at times. I think it's important that they know who they are working for, and that they are able to ask questions of me if they have them. Time prevents any deeper relationship with them, sadly.

Crews are an unfortunate necessity. While flying smaller craft can mitigate this need, only with frigates can you completely eliminate it.

My standing procedure is to provide a comprehensive benefits package -- full health, retirement, compensated room and board while on deployment, and hazard pay in combat zones. Life insurance comes into the package as well, though with stipulations on proper performance of duty in the face of hazard.

Fortunately, I haven't had need to pay out the life insurance for ship crews in the past two months, since I deployed out to Syndicate. Unfortunately, several hundred Priano marines were casualties on Haatomo. Given that they were among the breaching parties, I activated the meritorious conduct clause of their conduct, and will be seeing to the welfare and education of any dependents or other young beneficiaries of their life insurance policy.

Oh-- but otherwise, I keep my distance. I tend not to associate closely with baseliners, excepting as necessitated.

Death comes for us all, Polevhia; but we can at least delay it a while, and seek to lessen the pain of it to those who yet live.

They're killers, else my appointed crew chiefs weed them off at the next station where they're to provide the transfer fees amongst the micro transactions of modules and ammo. The appointed crew also provide a list of needed supplies to keep the crew sharp and happy, from drugs (no amounts noticeable) to anything that empowers the crew. I also prefer a woman-empowered and majority crew, as when I do meet them they're the only faces I can stand to interact with.

Very soon they learn the value of image and numbers. Image for when I bring them along on station/underground visits. Numbers for when I don't. I pull my bodyguards from my crew's staff, portable implants or not, my crew is there to execute me before I dare fall into the hands of my enemy as much as protect me.

Numbers for when at sail. The thought that they're in the business of killing capsuleers is soothing and I reward them well at dock (or appoint those who will for me). I prefer numbers especially behind my guns, ammo feeds, and the management of my retro-thrusters for sharp changes in maneuvering.

((Gun overload rates/times, lag with guns, reloads, and changes in manual movements [where orbiting doesn't help], alignment times all are considered IC elements of crew performance and I show my gratification of them in subsequent RPs.))

At times, I pull them aside as temporary lovers, an honor I don't ever typically share but I find it quite the reward for those who've demonstrated an exceptional job, off ship or on. Yet I always consider one will attempt to backstab me, someone somewhere always will. Sometimes its more fun that way, sometimes it's known ahead of time.

I try to salvage them where I can. I give them the location to my trade hub station in the event I can't salvage them and order evacuations the moment my vessel breaches hull. From there, it's up to them. Of those who make it to the escape pods, some take their inheritance and leave for good. Others use their funds to make in back to the hub station, where a simple message to my crew chiefs will get them back aboard. Of those who can't make it to the pods, they hide in the cargo and wreckage and pray. If you fail to see my wreck after an hour of it lingering, it means one of the escape pod crew organized a salvage party and came back.

Nothing will change the fact that I'm immortal and they're not. They know this, they know that in another world I would be able to value them more than I do but at the end of the day, I can't trouble myself with their affairs and count on appointed staff to sort them for me. Even the crew chiefs know that under a certain light, they're expendable. They also especially know of my many enemies and how my enemies would use such sympathy/priorities for my crew against me. I expose them to my life and the grim nature of universe we're in.

Occasionally schedules will open or on the rarest occasion I will MAKE them open for me to attend a funeral. But these days even that is a liberty I don't have/can afford.

For that matter, what a fascinating study in sociopathy. Do we need to wait for Polevhia to state that someone is monstrous, an excellent example of why capsuleers are regarded as inhuman?

You as well as the majority of those who prize their crews forget that you alone have the capsule. NOBODY else on your vessel controls the ship as you do nor has the immortal implants you do. When your ship is destroyed, there's a 75% chance your crew will be lost forever. And if they live, your systems aren't calibrated to see their escape pods to retrieve them. (Hence why you don't see them on your overview.) Only you are immortal.

If you want to stay to save every lifeboat of a ship, that's fine. I'm sure every predator in low security or hostile space is begging for a reason for you to linger on the grid longer. But the bottom line is you're risking more people if you do.

The capsuleers who sully this fact don't fly outside the borders of their precious CONCORD and rarely have seen the darker side of space. Don't let them fill you with delusional thoughts that every life counts and that each member of the crew is worthy of stopping your agenda for. You'll make for easy prey and I will personally calibrate my overview to slice your crew to shreds the moment we cross in dangerous space.

And I will let you watch in local as I do it.

If you have doubts as to the body count you generate, contact me. I will happily follow you cloaked, in high or low security, in your precious missions, in your mining ops, and will happily enlighten you to how many lives you ruin or destroy in your wake.

((And I will link you the chronicles to prove it.))

You don't live in a pretty galaxy, you aren't a kind race, especially where you're supported by mass-murdering mega corporations and their operations.

If you aren't a capsuleer, you're in a better place, you've not had a red carpet rolled out for you that walks over millions yet. Yet power in time will yield the same result.

Renounce all power and you're safe from walking over society but you're powerless to stop us in the slightest. Good luck with that.

Momaki has taken compassion to an obsessive extreme, I agree. you take dispassion to an equal extreme.

The crew loss percentage rate you listed is the combined global average for all capsuleers and all ship classes, including extreme cases who deactivate the escape pods and atmo lockers. The capsuleer rates describe a bell curve, with especially conscientious pilots and excessively callous pilots occupying the far extremes. Most are in the swell at the middle. Different ship classes have different rates, too.

For my part, as I said - you serve on my decks only if you can demonstrate time and again that you can Brace for Eject within five seconds provided that is at all reasonably possible. It is in most cases - there are enough honeycomb chairs, atmo lockers and dump chutes in these ships that we'd actually gain significantly in structural integrity if we got rid of them all.

There are regular drills, but not so regular as to promote complacency. I do as much as I can to minimise losses on a disintegrating ship, and I alert system authorities and my own corpmates to the existence of the wreck.

I take, in other words, reasonable steps. If they fail, there's a generous bereavement package or charitable donation, whichever the crewman in question specifies.

You can't get too close, I agree. But you still have a duty of care to the people you employ.

If I the number of crew members is below one hundred, I like to have a chat with everyone. We go through their strengths and challenges in a constructive fashion and discuss about their risks and opportunities. I tell them they play an important role in the team, and ask them to contact me personally if they encounter any problems. The process does not take too long because holopresence and social training allow me to have all the conversations simultaneously - a trick many capsuleers employ in their mutual communications - and it has a huge effect on the synergy.

When the crew size grows, I can only afford to stay in touch with the key personnel and trust and hope that they, together with the labour hire company supplying the crew, can maintain an accommodating working environment. Sometimes, after tension build-up moments, free hot towels and Quafe have been provided. Before undertaking long distance travel, I also go and check that there are snacks and a gambling facility available aboard the ship.

Hakatain Dynasty has a standing order with InterBus to return our employees to either Korama or Gulfonodi if they can reach a terminal, and there's a generous bounty for rescuing my shipwrecked crew and delivering them to a station with an InterBus terminal. It's significantly more than the going rate the interstellar bottom feeders would get for selling them to slavers, or Sansha's Nation.

Not a perfect system, but there's no such thing as perfection. You're quite right that what's best is not to lose the ship in the first place, which I pride myself in being rather good at.

Ship losses are inevitable, however, and as their employer, captain and commander I feel duty-bound to make a reasonable effort - i.e. a non-zero one - to recover lost crew.

It is, ultimately, a high-risk career and they know that. As I said, both your callous "okay, forget them and move on" and Momaki's "love all of them as my brother" approaches are extremes. I think I've found an acceptable compromise between duty of care, and practicality.