EVE Fiction

Officially, it's one crewman at most on a capsule-flown frigate.

New Eden has lost 41% of not only it's working class, but also it's reproductive members, in about half the time it takes to raise the next generation. Assuming a generous galaxy-wide growth rate of 2% per year would basically be saying that society forgot what contraceptives were also, while paying no heed to the incredible amount of stress being put on the reproducing population. Keep in mind that that rate of growth takes in all other mortality rates, including terran wars.

So assuming the best case scenario, New Eden has been hemorrhaging at least twice as many able-bodied people as it is producing every year for a decade running, and shows no signs of stopping any time soon. Good luck with dreaming up a society or an economy that can survive that.

You can't tell me those Sansha Incursions (plus the modifications that allow the captured civilians to be controlled) are a cheap endeavor on their part, and cloning has to be at least mildly more expensive than that, or they wouldn't bother.

This is what confuses me: obviously most crew are "baseliners," not cloned, and while there might be escape pods, going into risky situations spells a real potential for injury or death for a great many of them.

So how, from a lore perspective, might we explain how groups like, say, CODE. can consistently re-crew their many ships that they use to constantly suicide gank with? At some point, wouldn't word get around, and people would simply refuse to hire on with people who are known to simply throw away ships and crew lives? Or wouldn't a crew, regardless of whatever contract they signed, balk at following orders when their ship is about to attack someone unprovoked in high-security space?

Because suicide ganking generally only requires you to have a round or two of ammo loaded and your guns pointed at a target, your crew turns everything on, runs to the escape pods, and ejects when CONCORD comes.

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.