EVE Fiction

I was thinking along these same lines as well. If you consider every ship we own, every hanger we have items in, and then the corporate HQ and stations.... Even small corporations probably have tens of thousands of employees.

Probably, not all ships are ready to fly at any given moment, and so most of them will be unmanned. And probably many crew members would work on several ships (after all, the pod pilot can only be in one of them at any given time). So probably we could halve those numbers, more or less, but it still makes an impressive amount of crew members and staff.

this blows a lot of what I said out of the water. . .

I've always assumed that barges and industrials are comparable to other ships of the same (bracket/class) size, mostly cruisers iirc, as they were not a seperate entry in that table. Crew requirements would depend on fittings, I can imagine that strip miners and salvage modules require more crew than cargo extenders and armor plates.

I imagine freighters are like carriers, but because they lack modules, they probably fly around with what would be a skeleton crew for carriers (700-1500, or 350-700 for capsuleer versions).

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/New_Eden_crew_guidelines

I know this is CCP posting on crew size. but part of me wonders if its a bit small. I don't doubt the minimum ship complement size, but the maximum. Considering that a aircraft carrier in modern times about 300-400 meters long has a standard complement of 4000 people. The Idea that a carrier at least 10 times larger can only support about 3 times as many people seems not to quite add up. Particularly since on the Carrier description (the Amarr archon at least) it does note its purpose as 'troop transport.' 18,000 people at most just seems a little low...

But consider this a nerds nitpicking and not really meaningful at all.

Technically, US CVNs are all supercarriers. Light carriers are used by smaller countries, and escort carriers are no longer used. What kind of bugs me is there isn't really a direct comparison to a submarine in the Eve order of battle...I mean, sure there are force recons, but those don't really have much attack capability, and stealth bombers are more like...stealth bombers. it'd be cool to see something kind of like a cloaky Naga or something go out and make a series of strikes and then fade out and move on to the next area of operation

There are many things a ship crew can do inside a sip that don't contradict your direct mind control of it. For example, once an impact has hit the structure, they would be the ones to fight the fire and keep it from spreading. Or the ones that would load and unload equipment when you go near an enemy debries and take what you can. Etc.

As for their salaries and such, probably they earn such a little wage that it could be thought of as being part of the amount of money you spend when you buy the ship. And POS are stations, so they do have crews as well, even if they are player owned. So you just take part of the population living in them and take them into your newly assembled ship.

Well consider all the small tasks that need to be done just to keep the ship maintained. Even in the future, machines break down or have problems. Considering the nature of all the different possibilities for problems, its hard to think you'll have a robot able to do all of it without some input. So its easily conceivable to need crew for this at least. Although for short excursions a capsuleer likely could take control of a sub capital alone and fly it into combat... excessive wear and tear for any prolonged periods of time would likely prove fatal to the ship.

Also, larger ships like battleships or capital ships obviously would need crew because one human mind (no matter how spectacular and augmented) simply could not control all systems with the attention required to be most effective.

Lastly, for the whole building ships out in wormhole where do the crew come from? Well in an in game lore aspect, your character likely knew that they where going to be building and losing ships, so made sure there was enough complements on the station when it was setup. Also any ships you lose would have survivors which could help crew the next ship. Hope they are paid well!

We have TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS here.
Look at the stuff we dig up for science. That's four interesting complete civilizations that have risen from nothing, prospered, then collapsed under their own weight. The Joves are probably not even one of the first ones. Gates can go offline. Might have needed to reestablish them a few times.
There were impressive civilizations before ancient Egypt - but we all know about Egypt because they had a fetish for writing things down on chunks of rock and burying them in sealed chambers in the middle of the desert. We have some vague sense of other civilizations of which minimal evidence exists. That all happened in a fraction of the time that we had since going through the gate.
So the gate shuts down, the ships keep flying, but they fizzle eventually as their civilization collapses.. only to be replaced by a new emerging civilization that rises, reverse-engineers ruined gates, and spreads, only to collapse to decadence and decay, then a new civilization rises, maybe from its ashes, maybe from a new social movement on a dormant colony the previous rise overlooked, it reverse engineers ruined gates and expands, then collapses.. repeat and rinse, then one day you have the situation today.

Also, maybe the capsuleers interact with the crew via drones. And it isn't too strange to think that there are systems to make sure that the capsuleers move around and work their muscles while in the pod. We have that technology today, after all.

I thought that those skills was more for things like: shut all doors for fire to die down, reroute oxygen and so on.


Some of devs said that items from wrecks are delivered by drones, but we don't see them because our camera drones don't show them to us, same with escape pods for crew.

And crones about crews:
about how disposable crew peeps are clicky
about capsuleer industrial ship crew clicky