Your ships have crews.
Yup, and they are immortal, because no matter how many wrecks I see, I never see a crew body drifting in space. Just the bodies of capsuleers who's pod has been breached. They always escape in cloaked escape capsules it seems. With drives that can warp away from bubbles apparently, even make their way home from wormholes.
What I'm trying to point out that for me there are no game mechanics that indicate the existence of any crew, and many game mechanics that indicate there is no crew in ships. My suspension of disbelief would suffer a lot less if they eliminated or extremely reduced the suggested crew sizes.
If I plonk down a POS in 0.0 or some wormhole, gather some minerals and build an Apoc, a magically trained crew appears? And if I repackage the Apoc and activate it in the nearest station, a new crew magically appears to crew it? And if I take down the POS, that thousands of trained crew are magically transported through the bubble camps, wormholes or whatever by Interbus to the neares station and appear there? Is the price of the crew included in the price of the POS? Does each ship building array come with free set of tens fo thousands of trained crew? Do you know how much volume a couple of thousand of trained crew would occupy. What gives?
Also, if trained crew is apparently so non-specific that any crew can operate any starship and that you never notice any differences in crew, than it would make sense to automate such tasks. In fact, I fully believe many tasks in EVE are completely automated. If I really had scientists do research jobs for me, or people manning my factories, they surely would have listened to me saying that they should continue researching as long as they still have blueprints, datacores and whatnot, and not do one invention job for 3 hours and then sit on their ass until I can make contact with them again, tjeez, lazy bastards! In other words, its much easier these are standardized automated processes not requiring any crew.
Let's not speak about the amount of food, crew quarters and whatnot needed. If I could convert my Apoc to a hauling or mining apoc, and wouldn't need 1 year of food and other stuff for 5000 heads, I would have almost the cargo capacity of a Freighter! I mean, I wouldn't fit any weapons etc, so ditch all the gunnery crew, feck the tactical and the scanning crew, get rid of the EW crew and the nanite managers.
Simple believing that there are thousands of crew standing to crew a ship by some idiot who can baits in Amarr and just lost his 5th ship of the day is just too much for me. Their burials are included in the base insurance premium (the one you get for free)?
Also, my apologies of uninentionally hijacking this thread by using the crew example in a previous argument.