I'm with Loulou on this one. You can take an average civilian and put a gun in their hands and they'll be at best an adequate soldier (shut up, gun nuts: I wouldn't know where to look for the safety). But you spend a small fortune training and equipping a soldier, that training stays with them from clone to clone. Instant reduced maintenance costs for an army, instant replacement of a lost man by the same man in a new body.
Look at it another way: technology changes and improves over time. Consider how great the difference is between the PC you bought/built in 2003 and the one you have now in 2011. Now consider the exponential improvement in that technology since the creation of the PC. Apply that to Eve tech. Do you seriously think that, once cloning tech was available for capsuleers, the technology developers would simply stop there? Like hell they would, they'd try to find every market niche they could and fill it while improving their technology. The first step was soft-scanning and jumpclones. Once they had that figured out, they could apply it to the next-wealthiest field: the military.
But there's still only one of any individual running around. I think it will remain that way unless CCP really want to go the way of the Star Wars Clone Wars bollocks.
Amarrian COSMOS missions show that the Blood Raiders have the technology of creating millions of clones in their human farms, with the marriage of these two technologies, you can have unlimited copies of a personality in unlimited incarnations. The incarnations themselves can be modified to any shape and form imaginable by man.
This wouldn't have anything to do with their belief that the blood of clones is more pure than organic human blood, would it? The body doesn't even need to have a mind in it, as long as it's alive. They're still a threat, though: they'd always need a supply of fresh genetic mixes. I've been under the impression that cloning from cloned samples leads to degradation (somebody correct me if I'm wrong!)
Then we have the DUST coming in, where you probably have this marriage of these two technologies to create unlimited army of highly trained soldiers, if you want the soldiers to keep learning, just put the fluid routers in their battle armor and as they die their mind is moved to a new body.
No trauma of death, war turns into your basic FPS gaming experience.
I disagree. While capsuleer hotscans start at the instant of pod hull-breach, the delay between a fatal blow and the imminence of death on the battlefield would produce a certain amount of trauma. Additionally, a non-fatal yet traumatic wound would not trigger a recloning sequence.
Okay, lets look at the implications that mass cloning and mass mind storage/transference has for the cluster.
Amarr vs Minmatar war becomes meaningless.
Amarrians embrace cloning technology because of their miraculous clone zombie psychic Empress, they just clone the slaves and let the originals run back to minnieland.
Have you read the PF? At all? Amarrian enslavement of the Minmatar (AND OTHER RACES come on, it's not just the Minmatar) has little to do with the maintenance a servant class and everything to do with their religion: the enslavement of 'lower' races is about saving their souls.
Caldari.
Earlier in their history they had the tube child program to have an artificial baby boom to boost their numbers. Now they can cheaply produce labour via mass cloning and even have clone drones that are controlled by transcranial microcontrollers.
A TCMC-controlled zombie meatbag is never going to be as good as a self-aware, adaptive, conscious human mind. I imagine the tube child program persists primarily because it's disruptive to a worker's productivity to have to raise and care for a child, not to mention having to personally incubate one and then recover from it (on the women's part, at least). Caldari society is a hard-lined meritocracy, after all. A couple would be more likely to provide samples to the tube child program and then accept responsibility for raising/training the resulting child, if they REALLY were that keen on it.
The Gallente, as a (so-called) freedom-loving people would no more sink to the level of zombie slaves than the Caldari would.
What we're seeing in the development of EVE cloning is an organic and natural evolution in technology. They're actually handling it quite well. Obviously there would be individuals or small factions who would abuse it -- raise your hands, those of you who have never even considered jailbreaking an iPhone or PlayStation? -- but there are undoubtably several negative consequences.