EVE Fiction

I'm trying to understand the "rules" of writing Eve based fiction. I enjoy reading stories, but whether it be reading stories or attempting to write my own, I always run into trouble with the issue of story vs. lore.

What I mean by that is there are times when a story is written in a manner that contradicts some of the officially accepted history/lore. This is actually not just limited to Eve, but many other fictional worlds.

The point at which I'm having the most difficulty bridging is with the idea that the ships have crews. A large portion of fiction stories that involve spacecraft do not have anything like pods. Most people I know think of a spaceship very similar to an ocean going ship when it comes to how people run things. The usual bridge, captain, crew type interaction, where the characters are physically present in what ever "room" the scene takes place.

Pods, obviously, change this a bit, but I've come across examples where Pods were almost completely ignored for the sake of telling the story.

The most prominent deviation from this that i can think of is the story that got me interested in Eve fiction, and that is the Clear Skies series. I've seen a lot of great reviews on the movies, and enjoyed them myself, but how was the portrayal of pods accepted among other fiction authors?

Should I, as someone who is poking at the idea of writing, just write a story then try to fit it to the framework? Or is it generally accepted that people can't always make a story that doesn't from the line? It's easy to think of captain and crew interacting normally, in person, and pods throw that idea out the window, but is it a hard and fast rule, or can it be bent to allow for traditional story telling?

Thanks.

Here's the gist of things:

- non-capsuleer ships were developed long before capsules by most of the cluster (how long the Jove might have had capsule technology is unclear).

- These ships are operated in a similar manner to modern ships, with a bridge crew feeding information to and relaying orders from a captain, and many more crew working as 'support crew' to operate, repair, and support systems throughout the ship.

- The capsule was only granted to the rest of the cluster relatively recently, about 200 years prior to the current date.

- The capsule ONLY replaces the bridge crew of a ship - that is, the commanding officer - who is replaced by the capsuleer him/herself, and the bridge crew. Support crew are NOT replaced by the capsule, and remain an important part of capsuleer vessels. I suggest looking at the New Eden Crew Guidelines ( http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/New_Eden_crew_guidelines ) to get an idea of how many crew an average vessel has.

- In some small frigates, the capsuleer replaces the entire crew; it's my understanding that this iis due to the (relatively) smaller size of the vessels and automation being able to deal with the smaller, more limited systems aboard a frigate.

- Whether or not a vessel that has been modified to accept a capsule could be controlled again from the bridge is debatable; however, it seems logical to ME that in smaller vessels the bridge space would have to be re-used to make room for the capsule, preventing the original use of the bridge. In larger vessels, there is sufficient room that the capsule could be stuffed somewhere else in the ship - perhaps in areas previously used by the now-unneccesary bridg crew - and the bridge left mostly intact.

- There are classes of ship that are ONLY designed for capsuleer usage. These ships have had their interal components so extensively redesigned that they are now unable to be flown without a capsuleer operating the vessels. The only classes of ship explicitely stated to be built in this manner are Assault Frigates and Heavy Assault Cruisers; however, it seems likely that many other Tech2 classes of ship are similarly contructed.

- Exactly how common capsuleers are is unclear. On the one hand, various bits of PF have stated that we are the 0.00001% of the cluster's population, which makes some sense. On the other hand, going by the information above - the existence of capsule-only vessels - there are many, many more capsuleers that we encounter as NPC rats flying such capsule-only ships.


EDIT: Dammit, BBCode. Parse corrently! Or at least warn me in the preview that it's not going to show it at all!

Post fixed

I feel compelled to point out that both of these can easily be true.

In a galaxy of trillions, one millionth of the population is still millions of people. Whether that number is of people who have the capability of being capsule pilots, or just people who have been discovered to have the ability to be capsule pilots, I couldn't tell you.