EVE Fiction

Not sure if this is the right place to put this, but it's been speculated that the circadian sleepers are collecting bodies to turn into Drifter battleship pilots.

I find this a little hard to believe... the cloning technology that New Eden has only requires biomass to make a capsuleer clone (as read in the Eve wiki). The Drifters appear to be pretty advanced, and some suggest that they may be Jovian. They should be able to make clone bodies themselves. So why do they need to go to the effort of shooting capsuleer ships to collect bodies? Particularly when Sleeper bodies are so abundant in wormhole space.

Again, collecting capsuleer corpses as vessels for disembodied AIs seems kind of silly, since the brains are generally destroyed as part of the re-cloning process.

So... why?

My own guess would be information gathering, either of the technology of the pod/clone/implants or the DNA of capsuleers themselves. That fits in best with the Drifter's current behaviour of scanning everything in sight.

This suggests they don't know much about the New Eden cluster, and therefore probably aren't local.

A wild alternative: There may be some hidden information in the capsuleer DNA itself. If the Drifter's are Jovian in origin, then maybe Empyreans were engineered to carry some important knowledge coded into their DNA. This harvesting of corpses then would be a retrieval operation, requiring vast numbers of corpses to average out the errors in mutations. Wild speculation of course, but a survey of the data stored capsuleer genomes should be easy enough (for the Empires and in-game scientists).

Mostly I'm looking for what other people think about the collection. It just doesn't seem reasonable for such a technologically advanced faction to go to such lengths to harvest something they can make from easily cultivated biomass.

Can you point me to where you found out about the flawed Jovian clone techniques?

You have a good point about populating their own worlds. If this is the case, we should be able to find some cloning facilities linked to the Drifters. So something to look for!