Share Your Thoughts - Frigates of EVE Online: The Cross Sections

Fiction Portal EVE Lore Discussion
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Hey guys,

I thought I’d create a thread for this, given that I’ve seen a lot of feedback kicking around on slack, twitter, reddit, and various other places. It’d be good to have a relatively centered point for some feedback so that future writing projects can continue to evolve in the right directions :smiley:

Feedback both positive and negative is welcome, so long as we keep it constructive of course. We’d love to hear what you thought was good, what you thought was bad. Maybe what you felt was missing, or what surprised you?

So, fire away and let’s discuss!

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Destroyers Of Eve Online: The Cross Sections. Sequel Please :slight_smile: O7

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I’m very satisfied with the overall quality of this book. I give five stars and can confidently recommend this to others.

However, if this included some images of non-capsuleer ships, this would have been a more wonderful book. Some ships don’t need crew for capsule technology, so cockpit is filled with various machines. The difference between capsuleer and baseliner is always interesting content. :upside_down_face:

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Apart from the disgusting chemical smell after opening (limited edition), I loved it so far. Also that this time I got a digital copy for reading, as opposed to EVE: Source where I didn’t get that gimmick, was nice to have.

My support ticket on whether all the items are remaining exclusive or are just timed exclusives, however, still hasn’t been answered :confused:

Haven’t had time to comprehensively read it yet, but my first impression was very good. Very good indeed.
A bit sad, however, that the Navitas is the only one with exotic dancers :smiling_imp:

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Maybe fold out in the future? Having the the frigate go across both pages limits the viewing of the ships in the book. You could have pages dedicated to zoom in or focus on different sections of the ship, which probably be needed in future if you are gonna make copies for larger ships.

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I very much enjoyed the book (and I note that it’s construction is far sturdier than that of my copy of EVE: Source). Although I recall that there is at least one frigate in the book for which the location of the capsule is not shown (I believe it’s the Kestrel) and that kind of bugs me. Really enjoyed the lore background for each ship. I was especially amused at the lore-consistent shade being thrown at Khanid Innovations in the notes on the Malediction in the Executioner section.

Lots of interesting details about the factions too, like the info about mandatory years of service. At some point, though, I’d like to know how the capsules even get into the ship (or at the very least, some acknowledgment of handwaving), because only a few of the ships have highlighted access points or even routes of seemingly easy installment for the ship.

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I just checked and you’re right. The Kestrel has no visible or pointed out capsule location.

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We selected various subsystems on each ship to highlight key parts of it, and in this instance we wanted to focus on the Kestrel’s main purpose of us in the cluster - as a small scale cargo lugger, hence focusing on the cargoholds and the starboard side of the ship.

We know where the capsule is located, we just decided not to highlight it in this instance :slight_smile:

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We actually considered fold-out stuff for a while, but it would have drastically increased the cost of manufacturing, and therefore the retail cost, of the book.

Instead, we decided to take the page gutter into account when putting together the artwork, and tried to keep as much of the cutaway details as possible away from the gutter and toward the center of the pages.

We managed this for most of the ships :slight_smile:

Personally, I’d really like to see us produce a line of posters from all the finalized artwork - that might be something we can put in the pipeline at some point!

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haha :wink:

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The book was stylized as drawing content from a CONCORD issued flight awareness manual, so we decided just to stick with the capsuleer variants.

Great feedback though :heart:

Perhaps we can explore the non capsuleer versions via some other form of media in future :slight_smile:

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Posted this on the old forums, hope it is okay to repost here :rocket:

The Amazing

● I love the incredible visual detail that was put into the art of each spaceship. Huge amount of work went into drawing all those little reactors, cables and generators. That is simply amazing.

● The fact the idea of this book materialized is beyond words. It is a fundamental boost to immersion, lore and canon for me.

● The fact everything in the book makes sense is fantastic. There is nothing unrealistic anywhere and everything fits into the lore with no problem.

● I love that you took the time to show extra details like the Exotic Dancers crew in Navitas or fancy quarters in Golden Magnate. I appreciate all the thoughts to show little things like cargo payloads or minimalistic stairs for the crew in engineering areas.

The Good

● The art of all cross sections is sharp and big enough to appreciate it immediately and understand how it connects to the other parts of the ship.

● I appreciate all the great effort to make everything reasonable and fitting aka external reactor visible from an in-game model is also being a reactor inside the cross section’s spaceship art in the book.

● The amount of technical description of each part of the spaceships is incredible and mind-blowing.

The Bad

● I’d love to have one-sentence descriptions for many other parts. Lot of times I caught myself to wonder about some cool little thingy I found, but there was no description.

● Some parts of the art have bold lines around them, while others are smooth without any lines. In some cases it breaks the nice flow of the art for me.

● Some frigates are unfruitful to general audience. Great example is Breacher. Cool little spaceship, but not many people are losing butts over her. Yet take an Astero; a spaceship loved by many, yet it is missing in the book.

The Ugly

● Not enough focus on the crew, quarters and living areas is a big hit for immersion for me. Some frigates feel like a machine with no room for anyone except the capsuleer. Yet they still have tiny windows and rooms hidden from the cross section art.

● I miss the human element, I’d love to see more tiny engineers near the reactors, more janitors, more exotic dancers and more priests banging empresses.

● I would appreciate bigger spaceships in general. In the next book (wink wink) let’s focus on various classes, like a cruiser, a battleship, a carrier and so on. Also, I’d like the EVE players to vote which specific spaceships they would like to see in the book.

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Speak for yourself, Caroline! I lose my butt over the Breacher!

Then again, I do love Breachers a little too much.

It also seemed that every Frigate only needs one crewmember (Capsuleer) to function properly now.

However, what really bugs me is…Minmatar are using nuclear fusion reactors now? I thought, based on the tech II manufacturing materials, that they had always been using some kind of miraculous nuclear fission technology to power their stuff.

I am going to blu-tack the Condor cloth blueprint onto my wall.

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This is great feedback :smiley:

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My 2c: Could be both? Minmatar are modernizing their fleet just as all the others, so maybe they are adopting nuclear fusion technology on their redesigned ships? So both fission and fusion reactors are used until older ships are phased out completely.

Alternatively the only reason it has not been changed in the game is to have ships require faction specific materials for cost balancing purposes - Fusion reactor units would probably skyrocket in price if two factions needed them instead of just one. At least in the beginning, supply would likely catch up with demand eventually. So this is possibly one of the times whe lore takes backseat in favour of game mechanics, while as I recall the game is supposed to supercede all other sources of lore.

I don’t own the book so the only feedback I can think of is if you plan for similar future books, I just hope all other lore (chronicles, fiction portal updates) will not be again almost completely halted for years because of it.

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Loved it overall, I’d like to see a short story written for the Caldari for the next book as the Minmatar, Gallente and Amarr got one. The Caldari also didn’t get a short story in Eve Source when all the factions got one.

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Very cool book. I read a ship a day after dinner; since i got it delivered. :slight_smile: