As if millions of voices suddenly cried out

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.  - Obi-Wan Kenobi; Star Wars - A New Hope

Each ship in EVE is supposed to have a crew, not just you the capsule pilot, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of additional people on board each ship overseeing the systems and helping to fly it.

 

Freebooted has covered this topic on his blog in detail and finds evidence that crews exist and don't exist based on both in-game Lore and CCP comments/posts. Have a read, it is actually quite interesting to know about.

 

Yes, get to the point

 

Anyway, it's been in my mind for a while that if ships do have crew what happens to them when a ship is destroyed. When a capsule is killed a corpse is released but you never see corpses when a ship is destroyed,

 

Does the crew all die, does a percentage of them die immediately with the rest dying in the vacuum of space or are there 'invisible saviour's' who save these people and take them back to a world to recover (it could be Sansha's Nation and this is how they get a large part of their ship crews!)

 

Regardless, there are obviously deaths and for each death you need a person to replace it, the question I have is this:

 

Does New Eden have enough of a population to support the continued destruction of ships and their replacement?

 

Remember, hundreds of ships are killed each week from small to large to capital class, potentially this means that millions of New Eden citizens die each day and have to be replaced from somewhere.

 

Crew Replenishment

Obviously it makes sense that replacements need to be of a certain age before they can serve on a ship (say 18 years of age) and be educated (to at least the New Eden level of High/Secondary School). But then do they do an apprenticeship type learn-on-the-job or do they need to be educated further to be able to serve on a ship?

Either way, you can't just pluck a average-joe-off-the-planet and have him crew your ship. If this is so then surely there must be a limit of the number of ships that there are crews for, capsule pilots are special due to the capsule but the rest of the crew is not, they are 'New Eden Humans' and as such still need to born and educated before they can serve on a ship.

 

Based on the game universe size, and the habitable planets that New Eden would not, if crews were a requirement before you undocked, have enough population to support destruction as we have it now.

 

The numbers, they don't seem to add up

 

I believe we have ships aplenty, after all they are produced in quantity everyday, but do we have enough people to become crew to continue the destruction we see on the kill boards everyday?

Logically planets have a population, they have new births everyday and not everyone wants to be a capsule pilot nor, one would expect, nor would everyone want to be on a ship. So we have a birth rate and then a percentage of that would grow up to be crew on a starship, but you have to wait at least 18 years before a person can join a ship.

Is the number of populated planets in New Eden enough to provide all the crews we need based on these variables?