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[Merdaneth]

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.

Capsuleers live in a world with endless hordes of raving lunatic zombie killers. NPCs tend to open fire without asking questions, rarely if ever warp out, even if they are obviously losing. NPCs appear to have no regard for their own lives.

NPC acting like hordes of zombies is a major dehumanizing factor for capsuleers. The opponents are effectively mindless, robotic and in endless supply.

[Victoria Stecker]

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.

To have "thousands" of worlds but only end up with “more than one trillion souls”, which I would assume to mean between one and two, would require planetary populations in the couple hundred million range, or lower. Planets with a billion people would have to be uncommon – not rare, but definitely not the norm.

Or, you know, it could just be indicative of an author who’s more concerned with writing prose that sounds nice and fluffy and epic, maths be damned.

[Mizhara]

Planets with hundreds of millions make helluvalot more sense than billions, really. Our own planet is severely overpopulated, after all.

[kalaratiri]

If you've got the space to spread out.. spread out 

[lallara zhuul]

Planets with hundreds of millions make helluvalot more sense than billions, really. Our own planet is severely overpopulated, after all.

Our world is under developed and very poorly utilized when considering the resources that we have.

The world is about 71% water and 29% land. Roughly 10.6% of the world's land is considered arable.

And still we manage to survive...

The Minmatar home world is considered to be a paradise compared to Earth, all the others have not been really touched upon in that respect so they would probably be in the same category as Earth.
The home worlds of all the major factions would probably have capability to sustain a comparable population to Earth if not greater, high tech and all.

Seeing the Amarrian and Federal capital planets being something a kin to hiveworlds would probably be not that far fetched.

Centers of commerce and government for a star spanning empire for a thousand years or two would probably do that to you.

In the Empire it is common knowledge that the Ardishapur regions generate most of the food for the whole Empire and its Navy.

Which would suggest a quite specialized society where more arable planets would be used solely for creating food for planets that would not be so lucky.

Which would suggest that the population cap for an ecosphere would not exist.

(Of course refuse would have to be transported from the more populated planets to the more agricultural ones, I would like to see a chron about shit fleets carrying the refuse of a dozen planets to a compost planetoid before it is returned back to the grain planet.)

[Aria Jenneth]

Capsuleers live in a world with endless hordes of raving lunatic zombie killers. NPCs tend to open fire without asking questions, rarely if ever warp out, even if they are obviously losing. NPCs appear to have no regard for their own lives.

NPC acting like hordes of zombies is a major dehumanizing factor for capsuleers. The opponents are effectively mindless, robotic and in endless supply.

I've always found the suicidal zombie NPC "never retreat, never surrender, even in the face of inevitable and pointless death" world aspect wholly unbelievable. This is better explained by the technical limitations of having to fly Captain Kirk style than by some kind of policy of death before retreat maintained by everybody from the Guristas to the Minmatar Navy (whose specialty is supposed to be hit and run, isn't it?).

I imagine something like this:

"Captain, it's confirmed: no conventional craft can maintain that rate of fire. The attacker is a capsuleer!"

"Damn! ... Alright. Order the retreat."

"Understood, sir!... Um. Sir? Engineering reports that due to the suddenness of the attack, our FTL drive is still offline. Warp drive spool-up should be complete in 48 minutes."

"... Double damn. Also, fuck. Well, let's keep at it. Better get the escape pods prepped."

"Yes, sir."

In other words, the only people who succeed in running away are those whose ships are actually able to do so (scripted, or the occasional patrol of belt rats that manages to warp out).

As for their "shoot on sight" aggression, consider that, to a rat, (1) if it's not obvious that the ship is a capsuleer vessel, it looks like either easy prey (profitable) or a lone scout (extremely dangerous to let escape); (2) if it IS obvious that the ship is a capsuleer vessel, it's the craft of an infamously murderous demigod who probably has zero sense of mercy or compassion-- which you're stuck in deadspace with at least until you can manually fire up the old warp drive. In that case, time spent broadcasting a surrender or trying to flee is lost time that could be more productively spent fighting for your tiny life.

It's not a perfect explanation by any means, but it's the only one that makes a lick of sense to me.

[Ken]

Dang, I like that point of view, Aria.  Still requires some SODB but it's a pretty good set of justifications for mission rat behaviors.

[Vieve]

One could also throw in...


"Captain ... that pilot's on our Neg-9 list.  Are you sure we..."

"Lieutenant, you remember what you were told happened to the last one of us who fled a Neg-9 pilot?"

"Since we're probably going to die anyway, permit me to comment that there are some sick bastards running this organization, sir."

"Comment noted. I won't file it."

"Thank you, sir."

[Aria Jenneth]

One could also throw in...


"Captain ... that pilot's on our Neg-9 list.  Are you sure we..."

"Lieutenant, you remember what you were told happened to the last one of us who fled a Neg-9 pilot?"

"Since we're probably going to die anyway, permit me to comment that there are some sick bastards running this organization, sir."

"Comment noted. I won't file it."

"Thank you, sir."

That's the canonical explanation (see, for the umpteenth time, "Winds of Change" and "Summer Breeze"), but I've never bought it. It MIGHT make sense for some (but all? Seriously?) of the pirate factions, but it doesn't make any sense for the empires.

"Victory or death!" as a universal policy is the same as saying, "We don't actually care whether we still have a navy after suffering a losing streak."

I mean, seriously: I can see the Caldari (ala "For the State") or the Amarr (martyrdom, yay!) fighting to the death because their superiors tell them to. But while the Gallente rank and file might do that if they thought it was for a good enough cause, I'm not sure I can see their superiors ordering them to: the society's too egalitarian for that kind of "You should all be prepared to lay down your lives for me!" attitude. The same applies to the Minmatar, but for a different reason: every life lost is another sister or brother, gone. To waste your own people's blood on pointless "valor" doesn't strike me as a very Matari thing to do.

Not everybody in Eve, not even from the more ruthless factions, should have such a glory fixation as to insist that no combat-capable ship ever survive a lost battle. You don't get to build a semi-believable interstellar empire without having at least that much practicality.

Also, if all Eve's human societies were so nihilistically "brave," I would expect the capsuleers who arose from them to be far more averse to strategic withdrawal. After all, pod-captains can't even die....