The Tower Caper

For the past two months I've been monitoring activity in one of the systems I have towers in trying to find out who may have taken, without my permissions, material inputs/outputs and POS fuel from my towers.

 

I haven't had any luck in finding out but since nothing else had happened until overnight Sunday/Monday of this week. Sometime between going to bed and waking up again (about 9 hours) I found lost all the output (about 36 hours worth) from my towers.

 

 

 

I had mentioned it to a couple of people when it first happened and was recommended to remove access rights to my towers, I did but I reset them when someone else (not alliance) asked for access so they could boost in peace).

 

I've now reported it to my corporation leadership and found out that I wasn't the only one that had suffered a loss. It seems a few people had and even more intriguing was the fact that the people who had POS access was a very small group of no more than six to eight people.

 

I'm not really bothered by the loss, ISK can be replaced and it wasn't a huge amount anyway, but more so I'm bothered by the fact someone whom I count as a friend has done this. If they needed ISK they could have asked, I have very favourable rates for friends and I'll only break legs once...

 

The corp leadership is going to put out a mail about this, not much else that can be done, the list of people who have access is small but there is no evidence or indication of who might have done this.

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?