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[Bataav]

I've been spending some time going over Bataav's established history, fleshing out some of the details and creating a time line of events, both personal to him as an individual but also from New Eden that have helped shape his opinions and develop him politically which have led him to who and where he is today.

Obviously one of the most significant events in Bataav's life is his change from citizen Bataav to capsuleer Bataav and I came to realise that I'm not aware of any details on how long capsuleer training lasts and wondered if anyone could help with this. From the day you walk in through the front door and sign your name, how long passes before you undock wired to your first rookie frigate with the ink still wet on your Capsuleer 101 certificate? Weeks? Months? Longer?

There must surely be a programme of intense testing and screening before someone ends up on the operating table to receive their first spinal USB socket, and there's going to be plenty of mental and physical training before you get anywhere near your first capsule. So we might be tempted to use our first day in the pod as our graduation day, but even now we're just being shown the basics through the tutorial missions so we can't really say we've graduated just yet.

It's difficult though to draw a line and confidently say, "Ok my training is done, I'm now qualified!"

At no point do we get that certificate or capsule badge to denote our acsention from one of countless billions to one of the immortal few.

[Katrina Oniseki]

The following is all loosely based conjecture, and any PF people know about is welcome to inform me otherwise.

I would have to say years, at the least, considering the scope of physical, psychological, educational, and perhaps even spiritual training that you'd need to go through. What's more, you have to account for the implants and multiple surgeries required. That comes with testing and profiling, inpatient and outpatient therapy. Even when you factor in your first clone-death.

My best guess is that Capsuleer Program training starts early in the educational cycle. I'd guess it starts as soon as you're admitted to one of the twelve academies (assuming you passed the test to be admitted to said program). So let's say you enter [SWA] as a freshman, and you've passed the initial tests. Alongside your school studies, you'll now be subjected to more tests and your first bits of training.

Since Wetgrave and Mind Lock are notorious dangers associated with entering a Capsule, I would guess that all pilots are rigorously trained in mental control techniques, and possibly some spiritual or religious meditation techniques. Alongside, would be some healthy martial arts to help express that mental control through your body. Of course, military grade physical training would be included, to ensure you both have the stamina to survive the medical changes and have the utmost finesse in controlling your nervous system.

Book studies would be intense, learning various nuances about everything from Engineering, Electronics, Gunnery, Navigation, etc.... all those level 1 skills are probably trained the old fashioned way first.. or in whatever form a futuristic college would teach them. Extra studies specific for Capsuleers would be included, such as proper control of your pod, etc.

After that, you'd be given your first capsule and clone, after a long and grueling set of surgeries and implants to prepare you for your first brainscan. Then you die, and wake up in your first clone... which would probably take some recovery time, maybe even land you in a coma for a week or so if you didn't exactly do well with your training. You'll begin training with the actual capsule for a while, then finally you'll set up your contracts with PEND, CONCORD, SCC, Cloning Companies, and other authorities involved. This would be a major milestone in the process as your survival of that nearly guarantees your success of the entire program. While I wouldn't consider it the -end-, I would consider it your graduation. If you can't do this, you can't be a Capsuleer. If you can do it, you already are. You're just not ready to be on your own.

After all of that is completed, this is where we enter the game. Those of us who choose to complete our training will continue on with the game's OOC tutorial, and work out the Career Agents. This timeframe is roughly equivalent to the final weeks of your most senior year in the Academy. The Career Agent window provides those final weeks of direct training. This mostly relates to more of a Job Placement program in today's colleges.

All in all, my estimate of this is anywhere between 10-20 years of training. The Caldari State might train a Capsuleer in merely 7-10 years, thanks to their culture of total focus on the task at hand. I'd wager the Minmatar Republic/Gallente Federation may take around 10-15 years, with a focused regimen, though less so than the Caldari. Conversely, the Amarr Empire may take up to 20 due to... uhh.. I guess, more time spent in prayer and an outdated system of education and training.

Like I said, this is all conjecture. I don't have any PF to back this up.

[Matariki Rain]

I'd looked for a discussion of this on the EM forum to link here, but it's internal, alas. Here's my contribution to that:

I'm not aware of any PF directly relating to EVE-present-day training durations.

I incline towards the idea that that the pre-chargen training is an accelerated initial course of maybe two years. During that time you have the pod wiring and sockets surgically inserted (some, like Isobel, may have had 'civilian' implants before this), you get injected with some basic skills, you learn how to be in the pod and how to use its interface, and some of your classmates go bonkers with intense nausea and hallucinations despite the best -- and improving -- efforts of those who tested you all for suitability and inclusion in the programme.

When you graduate you can use the pod interface, fly a 1-person noobship and use some civilian modules. There's a huge amount of training still to happen before you can do most of the things we do, and that seems to happen after graduation. I used to consider the learning skills to be the first part of this: a strongly-recommended post-graduate course.

While I wouldn't be surprised to hear of an officer cadet scheme which turned out well-rounded, strategic-thinking officer-pilots who knew how to comport themselves around the tribal elite, as Arnulf describes, I don't think that is what all the RMS graduates went through. For some of us it seems to have been more a matter of air-force-style basic training, surgery, pod stuff, basic flying stuff, slap on the back and out the hangar door.

I have no idea what the business-school graduates went through.

A key difficulty with saying the training takes ten years is that the combination of technologies which enable "our kind" of re-spawning pod pilots has been around for only nine years, since YC 104:

It was not until eight years ago that clone manufacturers realized the vast potential of the hydrostatic capsule as a platform for their own technology. Funded by some of the largest megacorporation conglomerates in the universe, they set to work on capsule research and development, buying permission from the proper agencies to make modifications to the original blueprint.

After years of dedicated research, a breakthrough was made. In YC 104 (two years ago), the first transneural burning scan interface was successfully installed in a capsule; technology that would, within six months of testing, allow for perfect clone transplantation upon pod breach in 99.7% of tested instances – a level of reliability far surpassing anything the cloning industry had ever achieved before.

[Katrina Oniseki]

Good point on the technology. i had forgotten about that! i suppose the two year tineframe sounds more accurate. wiuld you agree though that the different races take longer/less time to train?

[Z.Sinraali]

I think I've been going with five for Z, but he was an old dog that had to be taught new tricks.

[Morwen Lagann]

I went with just shy of 3 years for Morwen.

She started flight school to become a fighter pilot after she turned 18 in August of YC 107, and after "routine" testing discovered she was compatible with the capsule, she decided to go with that instead. She graduated from the capsuleer training, and got her license in mid-June YC 110, at the launch of Empyrean Age. After that, she took an extra year's worth of "graduate coursework" - that is, stayed in noobcorp for a year.

[Ciarente]

Cia's training was more like a year, which was largely because it was pulled out of thin air without having read a thread such as this two and a half years ago when I started playing ...

I just don't talk about it now. 

[lallara zhuul]

Two weeks.

You go through the screening process, you get the implants fitted, you spend the next two weeks having your brain rewired by the basic training skillbooks. You're taught what to expect when you go through pod death and how to adjust to a new body (Intaki Reborn 101) and then you are kicked out in your newbie frig.

None of the players are trained in any of the disciplines that they say that their characters have when they first fly in space, in those respects the players skills are the limiting factor.

You can make believe as much as you want of being a top notch ace fighter pilot but anyone that has any dog fighting experience as a player will take you to school pretty fast.

Meaning that your character does not have the skill sets needed to defeat another character whose player has those skills.

If the military schools would supply their pilots with even rudimentary training in fleet discipline then the Militia fleet ops would not be such clusterfucks.
If the military schools would supply their pilots with even rudimentary training in piloting a ship, then you would have more than the orbiting options in the drop down menu.

Your character is pretty much a blank slate when it comes out of the school, hence the school has not made any mark on him/her. Partially this gives the great opportunity for the pilots to be from any kind of background, because the training is so limited, and partially it limits any kind of skill set transfer from the previous life beyond starting your life in the pod.

A housewife with wicked muffin baking skills has as much transferable skills to being a capsuleer as a veteran fighter pilot has.

[Alain Colcer]

As lallara illustrates, it looks or at least it points that the whole process is rather quick.

The mindlock chronicle describes a soldier who just got new implants and is "pushed" into a pod to control a ship. There is no special training or anything. Sadly he is not able to return to normal state because of lack of training, so i guess its just learning that small detail what separates capsuleers from the rest.

[Sakaane Eionell]

I tend to feel capsuleer skill in the game environment upon character creation versus capsuleer skill in a roleplay environment upon character creation are simply not compatible due to the limitations of gameplay mechanics. It's one of those things I think just has to be ignored or smoothed over regarding character history.

OOC, it makes sense that a capsuleer is a blank slate and unskilled when undocking in their n00b frigate for the first time. The player has no experience within the game and understandably has to learn how it all works.

But IC, it does not make sense. Even though injecting skills can have a person "learn" the knowledge necessary to operate a ship, one still has to have hands-on experience going through the motions. Humans learn by doing. You would not go to the DMV, be told how to drive a car, then given one and sent on your way; likewise, an educational entity would not really only give theory instruction to capsuleers, then give them a frigate and send them on their way. A frigate itself is a massively deadly weapon in its own right, even if it can be snuffed out without a thought by larger vessels. It would be an insane liability issue.

Given in-game we have military and non-military NPC schools which train capsuleers, I like to look at it similar to a university degree program. Four years, on average, of learning skills we don't have to train in the game (advanced physics, introduction to space flight, etc), being taken out into space on training maneuvers, ongoing testing for capsuleer-capsule connection stability, learning how to discipline one's thoughts to achieve the concentration necessary to fly a ship (practice activating/deactivating modules and otherwise issuing all manner of commands mentally), and so on.

I also believe that mileage will vary depending on the character's background. Someone who already has non-capsule space flight training still has a lot to learn but could be "fast-tracked" to be a capsuleer, because the experience they already have in space (and the underlying skills and knowledge needed for that) would lend well to the balance needed to be a pod pilot.

After all that, for me the date we actually enter the game is the date we are judged to have passed all requirements necessary to be let loose on the galaxy. In-game tutorials are only an OOC game mechanic limitation for the aforementioned player inexperience (unless, as some have mentioned, it works for your RP).

[Seriphyn]

Considering we start out with only a small amount of SP, it does beg the question of WHAT we're training for exactly. I would go with the a very short period of time of screening, surgery etc, before being thrown into a pod. The Caldari guy in Jovian Wetgrave was able to be put in one within minutes, though he wasn't screened to see whether or not he was compatible. If he was compatible, then it may just take no time at all.

[Isobel Mitar]

For Isobel (from RUN) I have played that:
 - The training takes years (not months) but includes also general education subjects that are not strictly necessary for capsuleering itself. One can fail those but get to proceed as long as one does well in the actual capsuleering stuff.
 - While there are groups that enter the training at same time, everybody progresses at their own speed.
 - The training regime is always to some degree tailored for each person specifically depending on what results they get in various tests measuring aptitude, implant compatibility, personality etc...

I vaguely remember there being a PF reference that capsuleer training is long and difficult process, but can't find it now.

[lallara zhuul]

You seem to work on the illusion that capsuleers skills are more than just their brains being part of the systems in the ship that allow the ship itself to work more efficiently.

There is no real skills involved in the operation of the capsuleer ship, it is the brain of the capsuleer that has been modified to work in a way that makes the ship work more efficiently.

As in skill hacking makes you no more proficient in hacking things.
Skill nuclear physics makes you no more proficient in sciences, it makes your brain proficient in interfacing in the decryption interfaces of the t2 stuff that they pay for you with datacores.
Same goes for all 'skills'.

Capsuleer is just a very efficient part of the hardware.

The training being a long process to me is just a Mary Sue thing.

[Bataav]

Thanks for the responses.

I think I'll go for the shorter timescale end of the spectrum, and that's an interesting point, Seri about Jovian Wetgrave.

Such a short preparation for life as a capsuleer might go someway to explain the lack of empathy or morals found in the capsuleer community - ie power vs consequence, accountability vs responsibility.

[Katrina Oniseki]

You seem to work on the illusion that capsuleers skills are more than just their brains being part of the systems in the ship that allow the ship itself to work more efficiently.

There is no real skills involved in the operation of the capsuleer ship, it is the brain of the capsuleer that has been modified to work in a way that makes the ship work more efficiently.

As in skill hacking makes you no more proficient in hacking things.
Skill nuclear physics makes you no more proficient in sciences, it makes your brain proficient in interfacing in the decryption interfaces of the t2 stuff that they pay for you with datacores.
Same goes for all 'skills'.

Capsuleer is just a very efficient part of the hardware.

The training being a long process to me is just a Mary Sue thing.

Respectfully, I disagree.

While I understand lallara zhuul's stance on the issue, I feel that she/he is relying too much on the metagame to measure the fiction.

I feel that's unrealistic. Completing the education and training necessary to be a capsuleer taking only weeks because we can inject a skill into our brains over the course of a few minutes? I find that unrealistic. Sure, you might have something akin to The Matrix in the far flung future, but is there any PF supporting that?

Even so the implications that the ultra-powerful elite of society are given less than the education of an Associate's Degree and sent out to make a living with a tool of war makes no reasonable sense to me. I haven't heard of regular folks being able to inject their brains with skills in PF, so I'm not sure that it's something that can be done before you become a Capsuleer. Working off that assumption, if you can't 'inject' until you have a pod, what kind of traditional training must you go through to be able to safely -go- into that pod? Surely more than a few months worth, in my opinion.

If however it comes to light that a Capsuleer does indeed only take a few weeks/months to complete; I'll accept that. However, I'm sticking to the RP that my character has attended years of collegiate studies, martial and spiritual training, and various other programs during her time with [SWA]. I won't have my character being the comparison to a two semester college drop-out, and I don't feel going to college is a 'Mary Sue' concept at all.