Hrm. Since I'm currently undergoing my bi-yearly temptation to return, I'll weigh in.
Trashing sapient beings:
To me, there's no question-- unless you specify otherwise, you're letting them go. Similarly, there's no reason to think modules you "trash" are actually ending up incinerated or ejected from the station; probably, they're getting dropped into some station refuse area and picked over by scavengers for useful components. Trashing = relinquishing control and claim of ownership, nothing more. For your purposes, they're gone; for their own, probably not so much.
NPC kill rates in PVE:
The chronicles have made it clear that encountering a capsuleer is a nightmare scenario for a conventional fleet. Certainly, the death toll in an average encounter is catastrophic. However, that raises the question: even if every mission is "real," how much of a dent does this actually put in the population? The answer probably depends on how large the population is to start with.
My thinking is that capsuleers are also something that is much less obvious from our own point of view: rare. In highsec, a very busy solar system might have a couple hundred (we're not counting Jita, which doesn't really "do" PvE).
If you figure that, actually, these solar systems are pretty fully populated, with deadspace pockets and asteroid colonies kinda all over the place, that those complexes you probe down in Exploration not only are there when you arrive but have been for years or decades, and just slipped up and let a signal escape that gave away their position, the scenario begins to make more sense. The empires and pirate factions are not merely nation states, but interstellar empires with, to our eyes, ridiculously large populations.
Aria always maintained that capsuleers are weapons of mass destruction.
CONCORD:
Two lines of thought.
(1) It's a mechanic, not a reality. In reality, CONCORD is dedicating whatever resources are required to destroy your ship. You lose. CCP is not going to just keep adding NPC rats until that happens, however.
(2) Alternatively: your ship's been pre-rigged to roll over and play dead when so-directed by CONCORD. However, since this only functions in highsec, the implication is that the system either requires stationary CONCORD facilities in-system ...
(which would make some sense; if it were as simple as onboard sabotage, someone would have found the device responsible and disabled it, then told everybody else how to do it)
... or that CONCORD has some reason for approaching things in just the way it does.
This last is lovely for conspiracy theorizing. Aria's theory was that CONCORD (and the empires' handling of capsuleers generally) was heavily manipulated by Jovian intelligence agencies, and might have been functionally captured by those same institutions. It all makes a lot more sense if you think of capsuleers as being Jovians-in-training, with a bunch of ruthless-but-doomed transhumans pulling strings behind the scenes.
This has the handy side effect of also explaining Sansha and the endless faction war: we're being trained. It has the downside of being an unabashed conspiracy theory. Then again, despite all their interstellar awesomeness it's their intelligence network that the Jove are really famous for, so.....
My own pet peeves:
* Tony G ...
* ... is officially canon.
* Never mind that this canon frequently contradicts other canon.
* Or that it deserves to have another "n" added ...
* ... and thereby made a "cannon" ...
* ... and fired.
"Ruthless," the desc-ignoring "origin story" for the Raven (which has the Raven as the new hotness and the Scorpion as the old warhorse, in exact reversal of the in-game item descriptions of the two ships), is only the most obvious example.
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Topic: What is wrong with the lore : inconsistencies, plot holes, how to deal with them (Read 7988 times)