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That Titan Doomsday Devices were originally massive, field clearing nukes instead of doomsday rays?

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Author Topic: Ok so  (Read 6792 times)

Dame Death

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #45 on: 04 Apr 2012, 07:16 »

Rgr ulf, but fyi it wasnt kiki that did, and nowhere have I mentioned names.
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Aria Jenneth

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #46 on: 26 Apr 2012, 22:20 »

The way I approach it is this: CCP has stated that every player is a roleplayer; some "immersionists" just take the level of immersion deeper than others. That means that, kill for kill, all actions are in-character. This is justified through the notion of the populated solar system.

Caveat: the number of missions is finite. The scope of human experience (professional or otherwise) is not. I'll get to that.

Now, it is only believable that mission runners get the level of business, and the scale of conflict (read: body count), if, and only if, virtually every system in the game, from 1.0 to 0.0, is constantly in what we would regard as a state of high-level warfare, involving massive fleets of battleships and facilities. Don't think late-continuity "Star Trek: DS9" -style battles; think more along the lines of several-thousand-battleship fleets from essentially every faction operating out of numerous hidey-holes in essentially every system, essentially all at once.

The fiction seems to support this understanding. Consider that mid-sized battleship fleets will be referred to at times as scouting elements.

One way to justify this is to think of these fleets as spending most of their time in standoff mode. Pirate fleets conduct raids and scouting exercises in force. Navy elements conduct defensive maneuvers similarly, defending a large spacebourne population resident in mining habitats, supply depots, and similar stationary civilian structures that capsuleers rarely get to see. Most of the time, the overall status quo is a sort of a tense stalemate.

It's when and where that changes (and it does, constantly, all over) that capsuleers get tapped. They're troubleshooters for a populated solar system the size of, well, a solar system.

http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/space_infographic

New Eden's population has had centuries of interstellar development to spread out into that-- thousands of times that-- and has done so. Assembling a battleship is like putting up a fair-sized office building, but the facilities are busy, busy, busy and a fleet of a thousand office buildings isn't so much to ask when you've got a hundred thousand mid-to-large-size asteroid colonies out there in that one interplanetary asteroid belt (analogous to the one between Mars and Jupiter) all churning away-- and even more working out of the oort cloud. Remember also that these factory-stations are not building to capsuleer design specs.

That's in ONE system. For a major interstellar faction, in this scenario, losing a few battleships is like having a few skin cells flake off.

Does this make capsuleers statistical nonentities, trying to erode away the great mountain of humanity with a garden hose, a few atoms at a time? Not quite.

It is suggested in the fiction that, among the pirate-faction rank and file, the sheer lethality of a capsuleer is little-known. Their leadership knows better. See "Summer Breeze," for a commander's-eye view. Elsewhere, or perhaps just "later" in time, the "Empyreans" are known as "gods of destruction," and the death toll they claim is viewed with ever-growing horror.

Capsuleers are rare; most spacers have never seen one. As populous as they may be around Jita 4-4, they mostly stick to their own dedicated hubs and transit routes, or to designated mission sites (or pirate facilities that didn't stay quiet enough, through probing). Conventional craft steer clear.

(Don't ask me to justify the damned asteroid patrols. I'd need another week with that alone.)

Bottom line: as lethal as they are, capsuleers are less a cluster-depopulating plague and more a strategic tool. They're not cleansing the cluster of human life just yet, but could become demographically significant if there were, say, a hundred times as many of them.

Mind you, the murder rate of your city doesn't have to be actually driving your population downward before you notice it's become a significant problem.

OKAY! ... So, with all that setup, how I approach missions:

They're all real. Except ... they're not exactly as described. No, I haven't rescued that many damsels-- but I might well have been sent on retrieval missions for a variety of abducted personnel. No, I haven't killed The Thief that many times, and he hasn't had pet drones every time, but I've retrieved my share of stolen documents from various inventive persons. The plot provides a rough outline of the "reality" behind the mission, and I look on yet another run of When Worlds Collide in much the same way as I do, real-world, to being handed yet another typical case: ho-hum; another one of these.

The background differs. The faces differ. The specifics differ-- and differ enough to matter. But it's still the same "type" of job.

This absolutely means that if a mission calls for killing civilians, and you take it, you, IC, took a job that involved killing civilians.

/braindump
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Dame Death

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #47 on: 27 Apr 2012, 01:01 »

Aria agrees with me? thats a first :P

btw in case u didnt notice eves a dame free zone at mo may resub in a few months i thyink we all need a little more time apart :P
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Nakal Ashera

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #48 on: 27 Apr 2012, 18:46 »

Perhaps it's just me, but something has always bothered me about the sheer amount of humans supposedly present in New Eden. I've heard figures like "30 trillion" being thrown around from time to time, and a lot of the fluff tends to support that - Such as the fact that capsuleers supposedly eliminate hundreds of thousands duing most level four missions - but it just makes my head spin as to how that could possibly be.

I mean, according to the lore, humanity has only been developing outside of a few fairly small bubbles of space for what - A bit over a hundred years? Prior to that, they were apparantly mostly contained within their home regions, and largely weren't even aware of eachother. I'm no expert, but I'm fairly sure (even considering essentially unlimited space for development and expansion, excessive resources and quality of life, etc) that the human population wouldn't be as, well,  massive as the lore seems to imply. I mean, that's what, four, five generations? It just doesn't seem to add up.

Please feel free to correct me on this. :)
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orange

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #49 on: 27 Apr 2012, 20:01 »



In 100 years, the human population went from around 1b to 6b on a single world.

I mean, according to the lore, humanity has only been developing outside of a few fairly small bubbles of space for what - A bit over a hundred years? Prior to that, they were apparantly mostly contained within their home regions, and largely weren't even aware of eachother. I'm no expert, but I'm fairly sure (even considering essentially unlimited space for development and expansion, excessive resources and quality of life, etc) that the human population wouldn't be as, well,  massive as the lore seems to imply. I mean, that's what, four, five generations? It just doesn't seem to add up.

Timeline

The Amarr have been expanding for thousands of years.  We know that there were at a minimum 9 generations of Minmatar in the Empire, in all likelihood more.  The Matari had expanded to the immediate surrounding systems prior to being enslaved.   The Gallente and Caldari made contact 635 years prior to the establishment of CONCORD and thus are likely to have fewer generations to expand upon the worlds they terraformed.

By far the bulk of the population of New Eden should be the Empire in terms of territory, resources, and time to grow.  The Caldari should be the smallest due to those same factors.

Time for some gross assumptions! The Federation & State example:

Assumptions:
Gallente Prime host ~10B people at first contact with the Caldari (approximately Earth 2040)
Caldari Prime host ~2B people at first contact with the Gallente (approximately Earth 1920)
Intaki, Mannar, and Achur each have ~3B people at first contact (approximately Earth 1960)
Every two generations after first contact, the population of each group doubles!
Note: 1E+9 is 1 Billion, 1E+12 is 1 Trillion

Based on these assumptions, the combined population of the Federation and State should be approaching 8 Trillion!




The Amarr/Minmatar analysis requires a lot more work since it is over 3 times the length of the Fed/State analysis and will likely have hit an upper limit much earlier.
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Aria Jenneth

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #50 on: 27 Apr 2012, 23:43 »

Lovely work, orange!

Don't forget, btw, that the Caldari think their low population is a strategic disadvantage and have been taking steps, like tube children and an industrial-scale child-rearing program (however dysfunctional, in places),  to correct it. Combined with what is probably substantial social pressure to have large families for the good of the State, that's likely to be greatly accelerating population growth.
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Ulphus

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #51 on: 28 Apr 2012, 00:27 »

The Amarr/Minmatar analysis requires a lot more work since it is over 3 times the length of the Fed/State analysis and will likely have hit an upper limit much earlier.

The Minmatar have a fifth of their population in Federation space, and that makes up a third of the Federation.
(see http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Gallente
"Minmatar - Forming a third of the Federation's total population, the Minmatar are the largest immigrant bloc in the nation, taking up a large portion of labor occupations and frontline military units."

and http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Minmatar
"...a fifth resides within the Gallente Federation, creating a powerful political bloc which keeps relations between the Gallente and the Amarr in a constant state of tension.")

Which, if you can come up with some numbers for the Federation alone, might give you an idea of how many Matari there are out there, and how big the republic is. (25% of Matari in the republic, about a third in Amarr space, 20% in Federation space, and the rest wandering about causing trouble making ends meet.
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Arnulf Ogunkoya

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #52 on: 28 Apr 2012, 04:01 »

The Amarr/Minmatar analysis requires a lot more work since it is over 3 times the length of the Fed/State analysis and will likely have hit an upper limit much earlier.

The Minmatar have a fifth of their population in Federation space, and that makes up a third of the Federation.
(see http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Gallente
"Minmatar - Forming a third of the Federation's total population, the Minmatar are the largest immigrant bloc in the nation, taking up a large portion of labor occupations and frontline military units."

and http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Minmatar
"...a fifth resides within the Gallente Federation, creating a powerful political bloc which keeps relations between the Gallente and the Amarr in a constant state of tension.")

Which, if you can come up with some numbers for the Federation alone, might give you an idea of how many Matari there are out there, and how big the republic is. (25% of Matari in the republic, about a third in Amarr space, 20% in Federation space, and the rest wandering about causing trouble making ends meet.

Unless I am mistaken the analysis is for populations by geographic placement, rather than bloodline. Mind you the widely dispersed nature of the Minmatar population does make the problem more complex.

As for the "reality" of missions. I tend to the idea that they are generic representations of the sort of work that we are doing. The actual specifics would tend to change. The predictability of NPC response could be put down to the fleet doctrine of the particular NPC's you are fighting. It can be a tad annoying when a mission isn't properly localised though. I have had the SoE L4 security agent in Caldrai space offer me jobs to go and blow up Imperials "for the Republic."

That said I also feel that standings with an NPC group do count for something and speak to the attitude that the group in question has towards the character. I'm quite comfortable with the idea that high standings with intelligence organisations could be used to justify access to secret information for example.
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Arnulf Ogunkoya.

orange

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #53 on: 28 Apr 2012, 10:01 »

Unless I am mistaken the analysis is for populations by geographic placement, rather than bloodline. Mind you the widely dispersed nature of the Minmatar population does make the problem more complex.
The analysis I did assumes that the populations that are added are a single world that is at capacity for their technological level at the time.   The population is able to double every two generations because there are additional worlds being added to off-load the population pressures.

Subtracting the population of the immigrant Minmatar from the Gallente population in my analysis for the Federation provides some interesting numbers.

It might be possible to adjust the later Federation numbers to take into account the Minmatar influx, but that will require a slightly different growth model.   Another way to address it may be to look at total carrying capacity of the worlds in each Empire, make an assumption for the rate of colonization/terraformation, and arrive at it that way.  Make another assumption that worlds are operating at half capacity within a century and that growth on any single world is asymptotic.  A worlds based model will be very different from the rough growth model provided.
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Arnulf Ogunkoya

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #54 on: 29 Apr 2012, 08:17 »

The main complication here is we have no basis for comparison to judge the size of the spaceborne populace. The populations of temperate worlds we can make educated guesses at.

I, personally, feel that the view that the setting could not sustain the death rates depicted is mistaken. As has been touched on we are looking at multi-system, multi-world and multi-habitat polities with a much higher tech level than ours. Some deliberately use antiquated methods. The Amarr are shown as doing this in The Burning Life in order to provide tasks for the slave populace and to have "redeeming" labour for the unenlightened to carry out. But this is not, I feel, the normal state of affairs.
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Bastian Valoron

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #55 on: 29 Apr 2012, 14:06 »

Based on these assumptions, the combined population of the Federation and State should be approaching 8 Trillion!
This agrees well with the data from the election turnout news items, which say that the population of the Gallente Federation is likely to be somewhat below 9.3 trillion but much more than 2.8 trillion. Since the Federation is about three times as populous as the Caldari state, you would get about 8 trillion with 6 trillion froggies and 2 trillion squiddies.
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Lucius Vindictus

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #56 on: 29 Apr 2012, 14:20 »

Hmm...
Capsuleers by their very nature are abominable creatures. They are created out of the cadavers of others and send legions of crewmembers (their own and others) to an early grave. I can't say I've ever met a pilot who never got his hands bloody in PVE or PVP at least once (unless they are fresh out of the academy).

There are no "good guys" in this game. The populations are huge, but power is held by only a handful of people, even in supposedly democratic societies. The Gallente Federation, Minmatar Republic, Caldari State and Amarr Empire all have deep flaws and horrific dark sides to them. The whole universe is very dark, which is exactly what makes it so appealing because I hate the "white knight versus fallen angel" cliche.

No matter how you slice it, capsuleers that run missions agree to do their employers dirty work. Period! Even when you are selective about which to accept or refuse.. do you really want to know what's inside those "large sealed containers" you are transporting from X to Y?

Anyone pretending to run missions for faction X, but only accepting the "good missions" will sound about as convincing IC to me as someone who walks up to me IRL saying: "I work for a drug cartel, but I don't do bad things for them, only good things!".... yeah, right! The job HAS to be DIRTY, or they wouldn't have gone through the trouble of offering it to a CAPSULEER. These agencies have billions of workers, they aren't going to hire YOU for anything but what's either too hot to handle for them or which they can't be seen doing themselves by the public.

When you agree to run missions in FW the missions get even dirtier... their employers even more bitterly opposed to the enemy. There are some pretty shady things and outright atrocities like raping POW's, killing civilians. Etc.
« Last Edit: 29 Apr 2012, 14:31 by Lucius Vindictus »
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Aria Jenneth

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #57 on: 29 Apr 2012, 14:57 »

Anyone pretending to run missions for faction X, but only accepting the "good missions" will sound about as convincing IC to me as someone who walks up to me IRL saying: "I work for a drug cartel, but I don't do bad things for them, only good things!".... yeah, right! The job HAS to be DIRTY, or they wouldn't have gone through the trouble of offering it to a CAPSULEER.

Well-- it could also just involve killing an awful, awful lot of people.

IC, Aria finds capsuleers who claim to be "good guys" at least moderately contemptible, for this very reason. OOC, my feelings are more nuanced: it's entirely understandable, perhaps even admirable, to try to be an idealist in a corrupt universe. These "principled" capsuleers can never truly be heroes, but that doesn't  mean they can't whole-heartedly try.

And if that makes them hypocrites in addition to being killers, well, that just makes them all that little bit more human.
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Ulphus

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #58 on: 26 May 2012, 05:04 »

I know TonyG isn't really flavour of the year here, but just to throw this out there...

In Templar one, about 60% of the way through it says of Jamyl
"At present she was the guardian of more than one trillion souls across thousands of worlds."

"More than" can of course mean "a lot more than" and given the time of night, I can't remember the relative population between the Empire and any of the other polities. Still, another thing to throw on the pyre.
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Ghost Hunter

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Re: Ok so
« Reply #59 on: 26 May 2012, 05:16 »

Off hand, as it's 4 in the morning, I recall the Gallente Federation having a population of about 3 trillion - that didn't come from any TonyG material to my knowledge.
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