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Excited about this project I am working on with brilliant artists and writers. Revealing more about of EVE's tech! https://t.co/w7SGbJD8ef— Torfi Frans Olafsson (@torfiFrans) September 23, 2015
I am a huge space nerd for cut-away schematics, so first of all let me say WOOO-HOOO! Please more of these in conveniently large poster formats, thank you very much. Nicely done, I like the style choices (please proof-read there is a typo!) and it looks amazing. Well done.
I've had a long-term cut-away project in mind based around the "bridge" of the Rifter for the past few years. I have some sketches already done and it is just one of those projects that I never seem to have time to get around to. I notice that this Comet generally avoids the issue of "bridge" and side-steps it a bit with the "Capsule Access" paragraph. The copy is general science-fiction verbiage that doesn't really tell us much, and the drawing is a tad unclear on specifics. I'll go out on a limb here and assume that is the Pod in there. We do know that Comets do come with crew members, so it is unclear where they hang out. Even though this piece says a crew of "one", that may be new doctrine, but it isn't what we've been led to believe up to this point. It is always hard to know what is real lore and what is hearsay. Again, I am overthinking it obviously. But that is what I do. A cut-away invites this sort of debate, it is the entire purpose.
Another thing that bothers me is the rail system for the internal drone repair. It seems a tad "steampunk" to me. I'd think a rail system would only limit access to a confined and predictable path. Obviously autonomous and modular repair drones, working together in flocks, skimming along the interior surfaces would be a much better solution. I mean even today we are making great strides with drone flock programming, I just saw a video the other day with a flock of drones building a bridge by themselves. Pretty amazing stuff. Heck, if not clouds of nanobots. This is the future after all.
Nit-picking is fun. Don't get me wrong, I love it. I'm a huge fan of the Comet and this just makes me very happy. I want to know more, like what those pipes under the back-end do exactly. And why is the lower front panels exposed? What purpose does the "police" light actually serve? And yes, I spend way to much time thinking about these things.
Trust me, I've drawn this ship many times. I know it very well.
I hope we get more of these.
Comments
This was all back in tech prehistory, back when 'floppy' disk actually meant a 5.25" soft disk in a paper sleeve... it actually flopped about a bit and was, at that time, the absolute State of the Art in Hi-tech.
So YES YES YES!!! Bring em on and I will buy them ALL!!
And... FWIW... as re crew...
"We do know that Comets do come with crew members, so it is unclear where they hang out. Even though this piece says a crew of "one", that may be new doctrine, but it isn't what we've been led to believe up to this point. It is always hard to know what is real lore and what is hearsay."
If I may, "...It is always hard to know what is real lore and what is hearsay." no, it isn't and I have yet to understand every time this erroneous statement is made as if it were fact.
Back when I started in EVE, granted a few years after you Rixx, (Nov of 2010, so 5 years fro me this comin' Turkeyday) this, "Am I alone on my ship?" question was on my mind wayyy back then and I researched and easily found this, New Eden Crew Guidelines. This is a official Evelopedia page, CCP created and maintained, and it has not changed once in the last 5 years.
This is official CCP/EVE Lore and Cannon. Our ships are crewed by more than just us. The lowest number of REQUIRED (non-Empyrean) crew is "1" on a shuttle, and I quote:
"Minimum Crew is the bare minimum number of personnel required to operate the vessel with only basic functions (i.e., assuming no modules fitted)."
So I state yet once again... our ships are crewed by more than just us. This is Official CCP/EVE Lore and is quite simply the way things are in New Eden. Anyone saying otherwise... well, it is a comfort to me to know that the 'power of belief' affects only the person doing the believing and hence does not in any way affect the truths, facts and laws of nature inherent in the 'verse around him.
IE Believe what you want... you are not alone on your ship and this has never been in doubt. Period.
They also utterly destroy any illusion that EVE is real, or that its NPCs are anything other than badly-drawn cardboard cutouts.
Any crew on a Capsuleer ship would have to be skilled technicians, not just warm bodies; New Eden's level of technology is easily good enough to automate away all of the manual labour jobs like loading weapons and sweeping floors. If there's a role on the ship that not even the Gallente can cover with an automatic system, it's definitely not going to be a job that just some random person pulled off the street can fill.
Next, capsuleers are canonically hated and feared by most of the population - for good reason, since many of them are cruel, arbitrary, and powerful enough to destroy lives on a whim - and in return, most capsuleers are paranoid and secretive and trust nobody. So any crew on their ships - especially highly-technical ones with access to mission-critical systems - will also need to pass stringent security checks to make sure that they're not assassins or saboteurs.
Added to that, quoted crew survival rates for a ship that is destroyed are very low - it's not until capital ships that the upper end reaches a 50% chance for a crewman to survive the ship's destruction, and the lower end is below 50% even for supercapitals. Add that to the fact that the time-to-destruction of a brand new ship being undocked for the first time is often measured in days or hours, not months or years, and the life expectancy of anyone signing up on a capsuleer ship starts to look very bad.
But, despite all this, crew requirements add nothing to the cost of a ship - there's no monetary cost, no chance of the crew screwing up, you're never stuck unable to find decent crew members.
So, given the choice between believing that New Eden has an infinite supply of highly-trained, utterly trustworthy ship technicians who are willing to repeatedly take on unpaid suicide missions for immortal demigods who treat them like dirt, or deciding that part of CCP's official lore is daft and best ignored, I'm firmly in the latter camp.
Cripes... the ONLY times I hear this kinda reaction is from those who want (1) to be some kinda god-king on their ships and think they can fly Titans one handed... or (b) those who have never spent a second on the Lore and wish it didn't exist... as it just gets in the way of their beliefs about the True Emergent Player Reality that IS EVE...
Whatever.
No AI or automated system today or (by the gods I pray) even unto the heat death of the 'verse, will or should ever take the place of the ability of the human mind to CREATE, have leaps of intuition and, dare I say... genius? Do you really want to live in a ‘verse where machines are the equal, or even better, of us?? I sure as all hell don't.
So yeah... we have crews... and yeah, they ARE highly trained and they are needed, but not for loading ammo and sweeping... for that we do have machines... no, they are needed for running and maintaining the machines and systems that do all the ammo loading and sweeping... only human crew would be capable of the kind of creative problem solving and troubleshooting that ONLY the human mind can do.
As for 'fear and loathing in New Eden'... I don't know about you bro, but my crews are loyal and trust me and they know that the dangers we face, we face together and the spoils we win, we win together.
Yes, "I" am immortal and no, they are not. But they know that that little fact give us an incredible edge in any fight where we go up against non-Empyrean 'mortal' crewed ships (Guristas, Angels, Mordus... IE NPCs) even the dreaded Sleepers. And they know that in a fight against other Empyreans, having one at the con gives them at least a fighting chance... instead of just being cannon fodder for the... how did you put it? Oh yeah... "Canonically hated, feared, cruel, arbitrary, paranoid, secretive, trust nobody and powerful enough to destroy lives on a whim..." Empyreans.
Again, I don't know about you man... but that does not describe me or those I fly with.
Crew survival rates are what they are... it's the cold harsh vacuum of space not a tropical ocean on an M class planet, and we are kinda lobbing nukes around... survival rates are gonna be low, however survival rates in the winning ships are usually acceptably high, as is usual in battle and war. =P
As for the crews adding to your gameplay... meh. They are there regardless. Mebbe one day CCP will ‘mechanic’ them into the game, it has been discussed before and it will be again... but they are kinda busy with the thousands of other things we all want. I personally do not "need" my crew to be a mechanic I can mess with... but I wouldn't mind if they were either, but that doesn't change whether they are THERE or not. Lore and Cannon says they are, so they are.
cont. -->
It would be a hoot if CCP did add crew mechanics such that only players who actually took care of their crews and paid well, players who didn’t take on stupid fights or suicide gank etc. or make dumbass mistakes, IE players who had a good “reputation”… what if they got good crews who boosted their ships abilities and players who weren’t good to their crews and lost ships to dumb stuff got crews that sabotaged them and were, well, the scum of the space lanes… LOL OMG THAT would be amazing!!!
And while we on that, no I don't have a 'crew payroll' line item in my wallet, I don't need one the same way I don't have line items for my food, or docking fees at Empire stations, or fuel, or any of the thousands of other little financial details that CCP has not included in the money mechanics... that doesn't mean I don't pay them, I do, and quite well too... that you don't pay yours is, well, your issue.
My crews know I fight for them just as hard as I fight for my brother Empyreans...
That you prefer, how did you say it? that "...deciding that part of CCP's official lore is daft and best ignored..." Well... you don't wanna agree with Newton about gravity, or with Napoleon about his losses, or with the official History of the verse you live in... you just go right on ahead and "believe" whatever you want...
You are still not alone on your ship. What you believe does not affect the facts.
If we assume 30,000 player ships lost per day and that the various ship classes average out to somewhere around cruiser levels at 33 dead per loss, that's almost a million dead crew members per day. That's in player ships only; losses of NPC ships are around two orders of magnitude higher and crew numbers are roughly twice as high; call it two hundred million deaths/day. (This is almost certainly an underestimate, since a lot of NPC kills are battleships, not cruisers)
That's 73 trillion deaths in a year... which is pretty close to what your 'billions of people on thousands of worlds' would give as the total population of New Eden.
Telling me that I'm not alone on my ship, and it needs additional NPC crewmen to run it? Fine. I have no problem with that.
Giving me numbers that imply that our crew requirements and NPC kills depopulate an entire planet every month or so? I'll write that off as poorly-thought-out 'look how dark and gritty we are!' sensationalism and ignore it.
Given those possibilities, I prefer to assume that the figures are inaccurate. (Or, to use my earlier phrasing, "part of CCP's official lore is daft and best ignored".)
It only makes sense. If the majority of crew in any ship died consistently, then there would be no crew. Let's be honest, people are not idiots. Snow crabbing in Alaska is very dangerous, but if 75% of every ships crew died every time they went out for crabs - the'd never find another crew.
Like you said, potentially in the billions per year... but, well, TBH, my 'suspension of disbelief' allows for losses like that in a star cluster with thousands of highly industrialized and fully populated planets... Keep in mind we are talking about a star cluster that has been populated for a total of 15,362 years... from the advent of the EVE Gate in 7989 to present day in 23,351 (YC115).
The EVE Gate collapsed in 8061, the initial colonization period was 72 years of exploration and rapid growth... after the collapse by 8100 only the largest self sustaining colonies were still viable. Mans Second Dark Ages takes place from 8100 to 16,262... 8,162 years of decay, devolution and slow rediscovery.
Then in the period from16,470 to 21,950 the Amarr Empire arises, rediscovers intersolar and interstellar flight and begins man's reemergence into New Eden. This generally marks the beginning of what could be called the 2nd Great Colonization of New Eden. New colonies are planted, the other Empires arise and in the time since, from 16,470 to today, we have had 6,881 years of growth, re-population and recolonization.
So yes... war is hell and the losses are stunning... but we have billions and billions of people on thousands of planets all doing what people do... living their lives and having lots of babies, its what humans do. And, IMHO, while the losses ARE stunning, I seriously doubt they are above the growth curve of the clusters total population carrying ability. Humanity is very good at the population growth thing.
So my personal 'suspension of disbelief' remains intact... though as always horrified at man's capacity for inhumanity to man... which is the part that I would personally prefer to believe 'is daft and best ignored'... except that it is also a sadly a truth of the real human condition.
Rixx,
If you look at the page I linked it has crew survival rates for each hull type... Survival rates for Crusiers and larger hulls run from 10% to 80% (std crews run from a low of 20 [crusiers] upwards to 145,000 [Titans]). Ships smaller than Cruisers tend to have lower survival rates due to the high capabilities of modern New Eden weaponry.
And you and I are in complete agreement on player 'perspective' and crew survival.
I even had a paragraph about the ISK to planetary currency conversion thing... but I edited it out as I felt a bit embarrassed, as I often do, when I realized my comments were longer than the original post... =\
But that's where the rest of my original post comes in. We don't just need 73 billion warm bodies: we need 73 billion highly-trained, impeccably-loyal experts who are willing to sign up for 'careers' where they last 2 days and then get blown up by CONCORD so CODE. can drink miners' tears. No glory, no comradeship, just an ignominious death so some immortal demigod can get his daily explosion fix.
That's where things break down for me. That's the kind of thing that leads to slave revolts and people inventing the guillotine (or everyone saying 'fuck that, let the eggers do their own work'), and we just don't see any of that happening...
We could assume deckhead at 9' (3M) to make things easy for back of napkin math. One area we have not talked about is inertial isolation and shipboard gravity. The immense acceleration the ships experience would tend to pulverize the crew if they are not inertialy isolated from the universal reference. It seems we need a bit of theo-lore for this problem.