Every NPC in the game with a portrait is a capsuleer. This is 100% only because the devs did not remove the capsule plugs from their bodies when generating them.
That said. We need a lore reason to cover this oversight. Is it enough to say they are just former capsuleers? I do not think they would be failures/dropouts because i do not think the plugs can be surgically implanted onto an existing body. They have to have a clone grown around them. Otherwise there would be no need to ‘die’ to become a capsuleer.
Can there be other explanations for non capsuleers to have the plugs in their body along thier spines?
I don’t think they are “former” Capsuleers. To me, all the agents belonging to the four factions are Capsuleers and why not. One doesn’t need to fly a ship and take missions to be a Capsuleer. There are Capsuleers who never undock, they play the market or build ships.
As for this specifically, non-cloned capsuleers have and do exist.. And yes the medical technologies of the setting do allow for those kinds of implantations with minimal to no rejection into an adult human.
And ‘cloning’ in New Eden mostly doesn’t work the way you’ve described, mostly. Most clone bodies are manufactured more than grown, from biomass feedstocks and then seeded with genetic material afterward. ‘Grown’ cloning does exist but it’s not as common and more time/resource intensive.
But Agents are not, or at least don’t have to be, capsuleers. All characters created through the character creator have capsuleer ports because it’s a limitation of the character creator, not necessarily because the character is a capauleer, and in many cases we have express lore of some of those agents very firmly not being capsuleers
Things we see in the game are not always fully diegetic to the narrative setting
What I am trying to create with this discussion is a cover story for an in game shortcoming.
It is ridiculous to think that all NPC’s with a portrait are capsuleers. But they have plugs visable on many of them.
So let’s say that the ones with no visable plugs don’t have them. Great. It eliminates a decent number of them. But there are still too many to say they are capsuleers who decided to do something else with their lives. The process of becoming a capsuleer is not for people that quite easily.
And there was a time when have a clone ready for your mind/skills was an expense. You had to upgrade a clone to be able to handle everything you had learned. What are the lore implications of that? Not all clones were created equal. Did that change as a result of improved technology?
And YES. End of the day this is all just mechanics and bad writing. But Lore Discussion should be the place players come together and say they will make up for the failings of the game lore as provided by the devs.
I don’t think it is. As I said in my first post in this thread, not all capsuleers fly ships.
I don’t think there are any shortcomings or failings, unless you insist in ignoring my replies. In that case you can think and say whatever you want, it still won’t be accurate.
Yes, it did. There’s even news articles and lore developments around the time the old clone grade system was phased out.
And it’s continued to improve since. Alpha clone technology even more recently essentially brought modern capsuleerdom to a relatively mass market by reducing the cost of the quality of manufactured clones usually needed for capsuleer cloning. And it’s only continued to progress since
And… we have to remember that independent ‘player’ capsuleers have been and always will be, the minority of capsuleers in the setting ontop of that
And the setting’s broader biomed is just… kind of brilliantly insane.
Another possibility is they are failed candidates. Lore page says only 14% of those that apply make it through prescreening and only 5% of those graduate.
The lore page from more than fifteen years ago(and yes it is the one on the universe website but has not been updated in fifteen years to account for the changes in processes, training, and cloning technologies)
We can assume not all communication between independent (player) capsuleers and NPC agents will be remote via the messages we see on screen.
If your standings are high enough, maybe they’re willing to meet face to face, but that might not be as straight forward as you’d think.
Back when Walking in Stations was a thing, the infamous door gave an error message if you tried to open it to access other parts of the station from your captain’s quarters.
Apparently atmospheric contamination was a problem at every single NPC station across New Eden. And I assume if normal baseliner spaces weren’t always suitable for capsuleers, maybe the opposite was also true.
In that case, having capsuleers as agents and NPC liaisons would make face to face meetings in the appropriate spaces possible.
Of course, capsuleers and baseliners mix all the time, so maybe the atmospheric contamination was just a ruse for the authorities to control us capsuleers after all, and prevent us from running amok aboard the stations.
I really did hate that error message in particular, because it gave many the rather false impression that Capsuleers have hyperweak immune systems and the setting’s medical technologies were utterly terrible because of it when the opposite is true
A decent number of missions at least security side seem to be off the books stuff. Handle this delicate matter by killing this person while we maintain no official connection. Even if we are not meeting physically face to face it could be taking place on a closed network within the station they know is secure.
Psychologically I am not sure how paranoid capsuleers may become over time. Immortal inside the capsule. Slip on some stairs and dead forever. Walking in stations may have just been too scary.
Which also fits for the NPC agents being ex capsuleers that have accepted mortality again and are able to interact as an experienced go between for the current capsuleers and the corporations they represent.
