Out of Pod Experience

Sorry to break it to you but the cake is a lie! There's no cake and never was, only donuts!

Published on Commissarkate.com, reposted here

https://commissarkate.com/2017/06/09/void-bombs-inhumane/

Void Bombs – Inhumane?


The warfare technology known as Void Bombs cause more than an inconvenience to a spacefaring vessel’s energy reserves. We are probably all familiar with The Scope news reports of large battles over space dominance, but one of the overshadowed casualties of this glamorized warfare are handicapped and equal opportunity crewmembers.

Void Bombs are a version of electronic warfare that creates a deficit of electrons in a spherical volume of space from the bomb’s detonation point. We won’t get into specifics here because it’s complicated. It seems logical enough on the surface to starve a ship’s energy reserves, but the problem lies in collateral damage. The electrons are starved from all available sources, and the butcher’s bill is measured in Gigajoules. It is indiscriminate.

To make matters worse, Void Bombs are commonly launched in waves. Some coordinated volleys pack enough punch to empty a dreadnought’s power core. Long before this threshold is reached, the first to succumb to the electron deficit are certain members of a ship’s crew.

In YC 34 an obscure statute was enacted to improve the employment prospects of the disabled and rehabilitated. The Mandate for Equal Opportunity for the Workforce (MEOW) required every licensed capsuleer hire 2% of their crews from a pool of disabled or vocationally disadvantaged persons. This demographic is very well-known for its middle-aged and older composition. A considerable segment of this group rely on various versions of the life-saving electronics colloqially known as “pacemakers.”

It’s easy to imagine how well a pacemaker might fare against a weapon designed to drain the batteries of capital ships. Most pacemaker designs require a battery sized for a timepiece. Should the order of space battle include the disabled and elderly as the first casualties of an attack?

A touching case in this most unfortunate warfare sees a young Caldari citizen seeking work as a defender missile technician in memory of his father. Defender missiles were somewhat recently updated to counteract bombs like the ones that stopped his father’s heart in the battle of Asakai.

“Heart failure runs in my family. It has for generations. I plan to man my defender missiles well into my mid-hundreds and work in space in honor of my father. Not a single reload will be missed, and not a single missile will miss. Not on my watch.”

(editor’s note: the interviewed missile technician’s ship fell victim to a combination of a citadel’s void bombs and its defending fleet.)

The Commissar Kate fanclub and its readers and editorial staff demand to know: what plans have been made to address this inhumane weaponry? Was the collateral damage measured but deemed insignificant? Was the weapon intended to disable the most likely experienced portion of a crew?

Several bomber pilots have been asked for their opinion of this casualty of war, and the answers contain a disturbing theme. They didn’t know, or it was never a concern. Most troubling though are the pilots who admitted the atrocities committed with Void Bombs but simply stated they were just following orders.

The Skillqueue: What’s Going On?

Capsuleers throughout New Eden experienced outages in the Pilots Licensing program yesterday and found their skill queues paused. Capsuleers suspect the issue is related to the licensing change from last year which allowed the operation of capsules and a limited selection of ships despite an expired license.

Prior to this change, capsuleers undocking or even activating their consciousness required a Pilots License Extension (PLEX), and PLEX have varied in price over the last several years with a mind-blowing upward trend. Over the last year, the cost of a month of licensing remained around 1.1 Billion Interstellar Kredits (ISK). Billion with a “B.” Current figures are closer to 1.5B ISK.

The conversion rate between one ISK any planetary currency is hard to fathom, just like the scale of ships commanded by capsuleers. A frigate class space vessel compares to the largest hulls of planet-side atmospheric flight, and they grow bigger from there. The cost of a frigate-sized vessel with equipment and crew is perhaps five million ISK. Cruisers and Battleships increase in cost by an order of magnitude for each higher class.

So on a monthly basis, a full Pilots License costs the equivalent of approximately two hundred frigates, or fifty cruisers, or four to five battleships. Monthly. A single capsuleer’s licensing costs can fund an average first-world country’s Navy.

The value of the interstellar economy is staggering, and rooted in the movement of PLEX. Pretty nice racket for CONCORD et al.

The big question on most capsuleer’s minds is how, with so much funding month-to-month, one of the core, fundamental functions of the Pilots License program could experience a systemic failure? The exact number of capsuleers in New Eden with active PLEX status is a closely guarded statistic, but most estimates place the figure between 25,000 and 30,000.

By current market value, that’s between 37,000,000,000,000 (Trillion) and 45,000,000,000,000 ISK in License fees.

Trillion. ISK. Monthly.

Just how much would it cost for the skill training program to operate smoothly? What exactly is being done with all that money paid by capsuleers?

Here’s something else about this situation that bothers me. Many, if not most capsuleers didn’t realize their skill accumulation was halted. Imagine your brain could receive information as if it were a holoreel. Wouldn’t you notice if the data stopped? Exactly what state of dormancy do capsuleers enter when they dock, and how far from reality do they detach themselves?

(post-publishing edit: many capsuleers take advantage of a scaling discount for renewing their license for several months, even a year, at a time. At the highest renewal tier, capsuleers remit the equivalent of 11.6 Billion ISK in one transaction.)