Intergalactic Summit

Ms. Hanaya? Respectfully, can you please not drag this back towards something so dull?

Unless your frig size vessel is destroyed extremely slowly mortality rate will be around 95%. Automation is indeed posible on smaller (capsuleer piloted) frig variants tho, especially if you are one of the "elder" capsuleers, also crews are mostly none existant on capsuleer's intis 'cause of shift in g-forces and it effects on humans.

Anyone on my ship is usually jettisoning just before I hit hull, deaths do happen quite frequently, though I'd like to think it helps the odds slightly.

This is the traditional part of a captain, so, if I sat on a bridge giving orders, I'd agree with you.

I don't think I'd do very well at that job, though. I'm not much of a leader.

No-- I'm a capsuleer, the mind and will of the ship. My clone lies, safe but largely dormant, in a Jovian cocoon; it's my craft that is my body. My systems are my organs; my crew, my blood. Communication's unnecessary. They know their tasks. They keep me running. Almost any order I might give is executed by will alone.

Even as a battleship, I'm a single being. But if I bleed, people die. That's not a fact I can afford to care too much about, or to forget.

I'm maybe a kind of fragile person, though, and I'm not very good at "compartmentalizing" things. I know my crew are basically components of my ship, and I need to look at it that way if I'm going to do my job.

... if I think of it as flying a crowd of people around, firing huge weapons at other crowds ...

Charles Schmidt says I'm a "special kind" of masochist for even thinking things like that. He might be a little right, but I also don't want to be someone who just ignores it, either. There's obviously a tension here, but it seems like the easiest way to be at peace with it all is either to become useless for the purpose I was made for ... or to be happily horrible.

Maybe it's hypocritical for a mass killer to care at all about human life. ... Even so....

As a capsuleer I know what I have signed on to do as a near unstoppable engine of death and destruction. But as a capsuleer we are going to have a long life, eventually peace will reign in the New Eden Cluster and humanity will no longer be at war with itself. When that day comes will we be as alien as the "drifters", as disconnected as the Joves whose capsules we inhabit? We will be obsolete and perhaps still near immortal. What becomes of human war machines in the era of peace?

I was questioning what we might do ourselves, not what others might do to us.

Can we, will we, find a new way to have a positive meaning in the long life that stretches before us as something more then instruments of death? I hope for the souls of all of us and because of the ultimate sacrifice of all the souls we have taken we eventually do evolve into something more, something better for humanity.

There's always industrial arts we could focus on. Manufacturing, station construction , ect.

What I find interesting is that 99% of capsuleers care about money and power and ignore baseliner casualties, and 1% (many of whom spend their time on the IGS) bellyache and navel gaze about baseliner casualties (while killing just as many as the so-called callous/heartless capsuleers who don't care). Do-gooders want to win their various moral arguements, and baseliner casualties are just another tool by which to "win" arguements about who is right.

Some of the best and most capable capsuleers I've ever known have either handicapped themselves to flying certain frigates to minimize baseliner risk, or retired completely because of the loss of life involved in stellar combat. What a shame. What a waste. All capsuleer violence is portrayed as either a callous pursuit of ISK, or a pointless pursuit of some cause.

Guess what? Most of us pursue ISK and/or some cause. Capsuleer and baseliner alike. There are billions of people who want a chance to strike it rich aboard a capsuleer vessel. They sign up, they may die, or they may retire at a young age, bloated with capsuleer-derived wealth. I personally served as a baseliner aboard capsuleer vessels in high-sec, low-sec, and even a year in null-sec. I made so much ISK maintaining those vessels that I could afford to get my own license. I volunteered, I risked death (and came damn close a couple times), and I walked away with more ISK than I could imagine (at the time). There are also plenty of people who are willing to risk death and injury for some cause. I doubt all the "Freedom Fighters" out there are in it for the money. Likewise I'm sure there are still millions of people queueing up in Amarr to serve aboard a capsuleer vessel and try to avenge the death of her Holiness Jamyl I in what likely amounts to a suicide mission against the drifters.

Why do we navel gaze and whine about casualties? Because many of the posters on the IGS do not have a military background and they are uncomfortable, as most people are, with killing. Anyone with a military background knows how the sausage is made and either becomes comfortable with the process or washes out. There are also a few freakish edgelords who enjoy letting everyone else know how bad they are, and they let the IGS know by glorifying their casualties.

Summary: Not as many capsuleers are gross, nasty, heartless killers as you want to think they are. Most are just well trained and disciplined people, with as valid a set of ethics as most of us, who do what they do for a logical reason and don't bother validating your morals. The rest either whine about constant and unnecessary human loss (likely while contributing to said "problem"), or flaunt it so everyone else knows how "evil" and "tough" they are.

Also, some of us supposed edgelords who post on IGS about lily-livered, do-gooders whining about lost life, we just try not to lose ships instead of bitching about it. Sometimes we fail and that feels bad, but we move on without making a scene.

Well-- that's kind of what I try to do.

It seems like I've maybe offended Karmilla, though.

Sorry don't really see the difference on a human level between capsuleer dormant in a pod controlling the ship and captain on the bridge or general commanding armies. Same rules still apply the only change is how fast things are being done.

Person form a unit that forms a section, that forms a squad, that forms a platoon and so on. Together they are a single entity with many faces that follow orders and complete tasks to achieve certain objectives put forth in motion by their captain/commander. Same can be said about ships capsuleer piloted or not - many as one, one as many. Armies "bleed" with their soldiers, fleets "bleed" with their crews.

Ignoring this is as bad as window dressing it or to be "happily horrible" about this. Some things just need to be accepted as they are, it's not bad or good it's just how it works and that is it.