EVE Fiction

Reference: https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/New_Eden_crew_guidelines

So every now and again I visit this part of the forums and read through one or two of the topics, I sometimes see people asking about crews and such. So lets get it out of the way first. Yes ships do have crews, Even a Merlin is stocked with 2-10 NPC crewmembers. However we (Or at least I) Do not know the purpose of the crew. With the reference we can see that even a lowly destroyer can even have multiple capsuleers at the helm, and a Titian needs at least 3,000 to 6,000 capsuleers to pilot it.


So my first question is: One, crewmembers, are they in demand? With ships blowing up every second, The capsuleer at most is risking a hard-asset. The capsuleer has no risk of death, unlike the crewmember whose life is at a very very real risk. So how could a capsuleer maintain a crew?

1. Crew Member is enslaved (Amarr) and is forced to work aboard the ship with no choice of his own. This would be a very ideal answer for all Amarrian ships. The crewmembers are just slaves being forced to work in a hostile environment. However this does not explain the other three other major factions.

But how does a Capsuleer maintain order with in his ship? He or She would need at least a few crewmembers loyal to the ship and maintain order within the ship.


2. Crew members have a real reason to be aboard a ship. This could explain many Faction Warfare ships. Mainly Minmatar who are former slaves to Amarr and might want to get blood anyways possible. Former enslaved Minmatar Crewmembers would already have pre-existing knowledge for day to day duties.

This comes with a few problems, The Amarr/Caldari war with the Gallente/Minmatar, is obviously a long one. Concord keeps major conflict from breaking out, but battles still happen. So with that in mind, how does a faction keep it's populous from burn-out? Looking out real life history Wars are often favoured for the first two years, but the longer the war goes on, the less and less the populous want to fight.


3. Crew Members are paid large amounts of isk for the job. This could be a Caldari way of maintaining a supply of able crewmembers. This could also explain how capsuleers become capsuleers, they earn enough ISK to afford the (Probably expensive) transformation into a fabled Capsuleer. However using the Game itself as evidence. The Capsuleer does not pay for his/her crew. Unless the capsuleer pays a one time contract fee when they buy the ship. however this would mean that the only two options for a crewmember to leave, is either A. the ship blows up and they are lucky enough to survive. Or B, The ship is sold and a fresh crew would replace the old one.


Also the next question is, what are the crewmembers purpose? The New-Eden race is what? 200,000 years ahead of current times? The factions feasibly have drones and automatons to do a lot of work. If we can have a Robot put a car door on. The Factions of New-Eden are 200,000 years ahead of that. What is possibly going on in a ship that a person can do that a robot can not?

1. It is more cost effective to either A. Force someone to do it, or B, pay someone to do it. This is evident in the reference as it states:



This explains that although ships still have automation to help the ship maintain itself and perform essential functions without human need. They still need crewmembers either out of idealism, or some yet unexplained reasoning.

So why do ships have crews? Does anyone have a theroy that they can share?

The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648): This is obviously a war that did not have the ability to communicate therefore casualty reports and other war stories which diminish public opinion of wars was not relevant at the time. Someone living in France would not know about the famine and destruction that was happening in the german area. The same goes for the 100 year war. Information did not travel as quickly as it does now.

The Vietnam war is a prime example of how News stories about the war can cause the public opinion to decline. You've heard of the draft right? The riots that happened because of it?

Someone in say New-Eden, would obviously hear about a massive loss of ships, it would be publicized. Most people do not want to die. If they did New-Eden wouldn't be around for Capsuleers to be around.

But people will care, when they see that 30 titans are blown up, which would obviously lead to massive casualties. It doesn't matter that they are on planet A or B. The news of the battle will keep most away from being a crewmember. My logic on that anyways.


Yes a missioner would be able to get a crew more easily than a Pirate. But the Pirate still needs a crew. How does he go about finding crew when he dies more often than the missioner? Same goes for a suicide ganker, only an idiot with no preservation for his own life is going to get aboard that ship. And what about the Null-blocs? How does a ship needing the least 3000 willing people find them? How do you get them into a ship with the possibility of an Avatar cynoing in and blowing everything to kingdom come?

Thats my question it does not seem logically possible for the crewmembers to be a feasible idea in the EVE Lore. There is too much pew pew for a Single sane person to want to get aboard a capsuleers ship. Let alone 30 or 100 or even 6000. The New-Eden is big yeah, but just because it's big does not diminish a person basic instincts to survive.


As a side note, I would not say every planet in EVE has a culture on it. I don't know the actual count or anything, but there are a hell of a lot more Barren, and Gas planets then there are Terrestrial. It would be fairer to say every Station and the few life supporting planets.

There are a lot of different questions here, soI hope I am answering all of them and not missing anything.

Why do we need crew when we are capsuleers?

A capsuleer controlling a ship replaces the bridge crew of the vessel - meaning, the people on the bridge making the highest level decisions about navigating the vessel, receiving sensor information and reporting that to the captain, and selecting targets for a ship's weapons to fire on. The capsuleer DOES NOT replace any of the other crew. The enormous numbers of people who maintain the ship's systems, perform repairs, and taking care of other crewmembers are all still there.

In the smallest vessels, such as frigates, there is very little in the way of support crew. This means a capsuleer can replace nearly all, if not all of the non-capsuleer crew. As you get into larger and larger hulls, the size of the support crew in relation to the bridge crew grows massively.

Finally, something to point out about the ship crew numbers page that was linked in an earlier post: I actually have an issue with that chart in that it jumps straight from Minimum Crew to Maximum capacity figures. Neither of these numbers are actually the crew needed to operate the vessel in a combat-ready state: Minimum crew is the bare, absolute minimum needed to get the hull moving in space with no major systems (including defense, weapons, sensor modules, etc) operating. Maximum Capacity is how many people you can shove on board and still have the ship function, including passengers or other people unnecessary to the ship's functioning.

Slaves on Amarr ships.

Amarr do use slaves as part of ship crews, but I would be very surprised if any ship larger than a frigate or MAYBE a destroyer was regularly crewed by slaves. As was pointed out above, you need to be sure that your crew is entirely loyal - as was said before, the capsuleer only directs the ship's actions; it is up to the crew to make sure the ship functions. A well-prepared saboteur in the crew can still cripple a capsuleer vessel. See the chronicle All These Lives Fit to Ruin. I would imagine that most Amarrian vessels have a slave contingent performing more basic tasks, while free Amarr personnel supervise them.

But what about automation and drones?

While automation is present in some vessels (notably Gallente and Amarr hulls) the empires of New Eden have largely given up attempts to create smarter AIs which could manage large portions of a ship's systems on their own after earlier attempts resulted in the creation of rogue drones.

All these people are dieing!

Okay, multi-part answer here:

1: New Eden is a hugely populated place. Each of the Big 4 empires (Amarr, Caldari, Gallente, Minmatar) have hundreds of highly populated worlds, possibly with populations in the billions (if not tens of billions for certain densely-populated core worlds). That adds up to a lot of people.

2: Despite point 1, the number of people who die on a daily basis - especially if NPC kills are taken into account - is ridiculously high. This is largely due to NPCs becoming incredibly farmable as player ship stats have bloated over the years; in the earlier days of EVE, not nearly so many NPC ships could be killed so quickly. The fiction devs are aware that this is a problem, and have said they are interested in looking into some way of bringing crew loss numbers down to a more reasonable level.

3: Continued losses in FW: This is why parking your storyline to a huge game feature which can't be easily removed is a problematic idea. Yes, the idea that the empires are still pouring ships and lives into a "war" which has had not identifiable results in ~7 years of conflict and regularly swings between faction control at the whim of farmers is kind of silly. It's a major point of gameplay-storyline-logic disconnect, and unfortunately is not likely to change any time soon on account of FW being such a huge feature.

Why would people join ship's crew?

Answers have been pointed out here: Duty, vengeance, patriotism. I would add sheer greed to those points when capsuleers are considered; we are incredibly rich by the standards of most non-capsuleer baseliners and the urge to join up with a capsuleer to try and get a crack at some of those riches may be irresistible to a good fraction of New Eden's population. Also, I would not be surprised if widespread conscription - especially in the Amarr Empire and Caldari State - was still a major thing. Some of those crews, even the ones not slaves, may not have a choice about being there.

Suicide ganks and stuff.

I've always assumed suicide gank ships were run with a bare skeleton crew - after all, they do not have to function for long or at absolute peak performance - and that the crew that is on them bailed for the escape pods as soon as the ship arrived out of warp to begin the suicide gank. Obviously, not all will make it, but they may have been offered extra incentives for dangerous duty.

Every vessel that has been designed or retrofitted to be flown by a capsuleer only needs one capsuleer to pilot it, not thousands.

However, it does require a standard complement of crew to be able to function, these are the numbers that you see on the EVElopedia.

The argument "why isn't everything drone serviced and automated" is pretty simple - meat is cheaper to replace than electronics, and high tech automation doesn't respond well when the ship it happens to be on board is being battered by a storm of vicious EMP, ECM and a million other kinds of interference.

The arguments are pretty solid on both ends of the spectrum, but this is the most logical choice, in my opinion. Lots of good discussion here too though!

Will be watching this one with interest!

Since this is a bit of a Fermi estimate, let's just add a zero to fifteen trillion and we can keep on murdering our way across the cluster for at least a couple more decades.

In the interest of defending the suspension of disbelief, I'll challenge the linked essay with a few points:

The numbers of crew losses the blogger mentions do not include safe ejections/evacuations. While the occasional one or two-shot blap happens, it's probably not going to happen on the larger ships with bigger crews. Now we can argue about when the crew's going to start making their way to escape pods, or why there isn't a pod-jettison animation on big ships taking hull damage (I chalk this up to the same reason there are sounds in space, and you can fan-canon that however you care to, but it really comes down to it being a game at that point and the developers did and did not design/code certain things in parallel to reality, and balancing the Ishtar is probably more important than designing ejection pod animations for each existing ship—I'd wager).

The point here is that you can't assume that every ship destroyed is an all hands lost situation, and that'll cut heavily into the blogger's numbers, as trained technicians and officers can't really go and flip burgers. It may take some kickass space therapy, and maybe a cybernetic implant or two to block out the bad memories of their near-death experience, but a lot of these guys are probably coming back to the front line.

That said—NPC ratting is a problem, and while I'm still a really new player (sub one month), I've already felt an emotional disconnect from running security missions simply because I'm already blowing up battlecruisers and the occasional battleship, wondering how the hell the Guristas can continue throwing that much manpower into a clearly losing fight and simultaneously be operating "only on the fringes of space", or how I have corpies going on doing 5-11 incursions a day against Sansha's, when they're supposed to be at some stupid low fraction of their numbers. I know it's a game, but the one-man army feeling doesn't hold water when my Drake's holding shields against 7 cruisers and a swarm of frigates. Even if that's what it was designed to do, the numbers are so heavily skewed that the disbelief there is snapped.

However, one could come to the conclusion that the reason rat ships are so weak is because they are far below optimum crew size. Why Sansha's or the Guristas would field such undermanned ships in such large numbers is still a logistical problem in the lore, but I'll present that as the devil's advocate argument for rat strength and number explanation as it relates to New Eden population losses.

But I digress!

The Evelopedia article linked in the OP gives notes at the bottom about how yeah, non-Caldari ships are probably going to have some drone supplements, which means that the other factions' human loss numbers are going to be a little less. Think about that, Gallente players.

Re: Amarr slaves

Unless there's specific lore pointing to larger ships not having slaves, I would assume that even ships up to Titan-class have slaves. You expect an Amarr citizen to do custodial duties in these ships? Suckers are 200 meters long. Someone's gotta mop that, and even the best drones miss spots.

(I kid.)

Amarr ships may have the smallest number of citizen crewmates, but those that they do have are probably overseers/managers for slaves doing the gruntwork. Now, yes, technical and sensitive stuff is probably not going to be left in the hands of slaves, but for the most part, I'm guessing a significant chunk of crew population on Amarr vessels is slave labor.

Re: birth rates vs. population exhaustion

Caldari players have the option for a capsuleer to be a "tube child." That establishes right there that New Eden—or at least parts of it—is actually beyond the necessity of copulation for procreation. Because of the amount of gametes the human body can produce, as horrific as it might sound to some people's morality, we can possibly accept the theory that there are forces at work out there that will go so far as to engineer meat en masse to crew ships. I'm not sure if the lore supports advanced aging as well, but with hormone/gene therapy, it might be possible to have ABSes (able-bodied seamen) by the age of 10. I'm sure somewhere in New Eden is a spin doctor who can paint such a human farm as a humanitarian effort. It's a bit of an exponential jump from there, but you could stretch that logic to the idea that wars have become a necessity to keep these places in "balance" so that the universe doesn't severely overpopulate over the course of a decade.

Re: motivation for crew to sign up with capsuleers

Someone else touched on this, but I'm going to throw in with the idea of money. In case you haven't looked at the market lately, Capsuleers can afford clothing more expensive than Navy-issue battleships; that's basically how absurd capsuleer economy can get in a single illustration.

In the real world, agents negotiate contracts for the parties involved. So, since we know capsuleers work almost entirely through agents to varying degrees, we could extrapolate this to an automated or assumed process that, when you buy a ship, there's an agent working just off screen to hire crews looking for quick profit, or duty. From there, said agent (who may even be on the ship with you and has the express purpose of hiring and negotiating crew contracts so you can deal with flying the darn thing) knows who is coming, who is going, and how many flights each crewman is set to have.

Going back to the real world, ships often operate on chunks of time. So you might have 28 days on, 28 days off. This'll make contracting crews a lot easier, even in the outer systems.

Why Capsuleers Just Don't Care (or, why NPC crew isn't a thing we talk about):

We have to remember Player Privilege here.

I'm not sure if that's the term, or if there's already trope terminology for it, but it's the narrative complex that sets PCs aside as "special." I just call it Player Privilege, particularly when it comes to MMOs. A non-EVE example would be like in Titanfall, why human players are "more dangerous" than NPC pilots (I don't know if they explain that like EVE's capsuleers; I've never played it—I just know that's a "thing"). In short, some of the crew interaction (or lack thereof) can be explained by operating on the illusion that capsuleers are, for lack of a better term, absolutely baller. Again, while it's kind of the extreme end of the illustration, we have T-shirts that cost more than battleships. That's some #swagger, yo. We don't deal with NPC crews for the same reason Beyonce doesn't deal with the stagehands that build her music video's set: the hiring of or firing of or disciplining of or even the interacting with the crew is done by somebody else (i.e. an agent or similarly-functioning background party), because we're totally—economically and socially—on a different level.

From one perspective, capsuleers are drug-addled immortal cyber soldiers that directly interface with wartime hardware on a level that can outperform thousands of people doing that same job, such that they can sail that hardware into a conflict situation with odds as great as or even sometimes worse than 10:1, and then wipe the floor with the first ship they lock onto before its comms officer can scream to the captain and their fleet, "IT'S A GUND—"

When that perspective is taken into account, yeah, if I'm an NPC mook, I'd be saying, "I wanna sail with that guy. Hashtag-YOLO, hashtag-unless-you're-a-capsuleer-amirite?" Because you'd be sailing with a captain who's the genetic cocktail of Robocop, Hunter S. Thompson, Mick Jagger and Jesus (sub in Amy Winehouse over Mick for the ladies). Shake well, serve over ice and, for null-sec, garnish with a dash of Charles Manson.

And when your little sometimes-strangely-placed-window peekers don't make it out of that gate camp alive, you—you alone—wake up all shiny and new ready to reach for your next martini as you lay down the platinum insurance on your next sweet ride. This is the life every late 80s rock star wishes they had, and some of them were convinced they were gods. Is it any wonder, then, why we neither see nor care about the passing of our crew?

~*Thought break*~

In my ramblings, it would appear that a new theory presents itself:

Consider the capsuleer v. not-capsuleer population of New Eden. I'm not sure what the exact number is, but suffice to say the overwhelming majority of capsuleers are the player base, because Player Privilege, or whatever it's called. We are, of course, dwarfed by the population of NPC New Eden by a factor of thousands, including both our crews and those of the rats we kill. Those 400-500k NPC crew hands were not flying with capsuleers.

So let's follow this logic into the land of possibility.

Under certain numbers, we might actually be able to come to conclusion that, despite the illusion of the contrary, an NPC crewmate's chances of survival would increase on a capsuleer ship. The reason would be that, for every capsuleer ship that falls, even counting FW ones, there are less on board personnel for PC ships, and there's just as many if not more carebears flying security missions in hi-sec wiping out 100 to 1,000 times the roster of their ship—depending on how you add up the numbers—on the daily, tipping the scales in the favor of surviving to a healthy retirement by signing on with a capsuleer. This is all well and good, but then factor in the fact that your captain is rockstar Killer Jesus ver. 6.0, and if the numbers add up, hell yes I want on that ship.

I have not the time nor capability to really crunch the numbers to verify that, because the level of speculation relies on theories upon theories, but it'd be an interesting spot of research for someone AFK mining to do, if they're looking to verify some of the existing atmosphere with numbers. Because we all love numbers in EVE.

That's news to me (again, I'm new here, so tech lore like that can sometimes be beyond me). But on the other hand, I don't see a lot of T2 NPCs in the fleet NPCs we get to beat up in security missions, or I just haven't noticed them. Not sure about FW NPCs due to inexperience.

I remember this announcement as well, T2 hull variants are made with capsuleers in mind. I believe alot of the NPC's with the 'Elite' tag are the T2 ships in their hands. This is often reflected that they need more effort to be shot down & in case of frigs & cruisers they can appear to be very resilient to your weapons if you only have basic weaponry skills.

DISCLAIMER: This is not lore, just how I imagine it..

I fly Rifters often. Sample fit:

HIGHS - 4 crewmembers

200mm Autocannon II
200mm Autocannon II
200mm Autocannon II
Rocket Launcher II

MIDS - 3 crewmembers

1mn AB II
Warp Scrambler II
Stasis Webifier II

LOWS - 6-8 crewmembers

200mm Rolled Tungsten Plates II
Small Anciliary Armor Repairor II
Damage Control II

RIGS

Small Projectile Burst Aerator
Small Collision Accelerator

Okay. From what I understand in the lore, the capsuleer (you) is very rare, selected from many many other potential capsuleers. I figure I plug myself into what would be my Rifter's main computer. As you progress in your skillqueue, your brain sort of .. gets more compatible with the computers on your modules.

I imagine these modules have crewmembers based on the size of the ship.. in my Rifter I figure there would be some technicians that work the actual modules themselves. There are literally trillions, if not more humans in the universe according to the lore.

I think a Rifter like mine would have myself, plus around 12-15 crewmembers. A gunner for each weapon, I imagine there's like 3-5 people in my damage control that run around with the duct tape, etc.