I’m specifically referring to the capsuleers employed by the four empires before the cloning technology was perfected with the capsule, resulting in us, the player characters, whom I consider the second generation from empire perspective. Alphas are either 2.5 or 3. This meant that of course back then, when you got podded, you died. So I imagine that they are a rareish breed.
There are some NPC actors now and again that have history stretching far beyond the release of the game, would it be safe to assume at least some of them are first generation of empire capsuleers? And by extension, surviving “first gens” simply became modern empyreans - there’s no reason I can think of that they would be incompatible with the addition of burning scanners.
Broadly speaking, any capsuleer who was active before cloning and the capsule were linked together would have been able to convert over to cloned status. There is no general reason why a non-cloned capsule-rated pilot couldn’t do so. Indeed, CONCORD legislation mandated conversion to cloned status for all capsuleers and incorporated basic provision of this into the Yulai Convention.
The only significant impediments would be not having access to the resources to do so or having some physiological reason why the cloning process wouldn’t work for them. In general, the latter would be very rare for people already rated to pilot capsules and the former would depend on their legal status and who employed them.
Pre YC105*, capsule pilots would mostly have been in the militaries of the empires, but the pirate outfits, large space industrial corporations and various other NPC entities with significant presence in space travel would have had some capsuleers.
Not all NPC actor characters are necessarily capsuleers and among those who are it’s not necessarily the case that their capsuleer status pre-dates YC105.
Those are the broad strokes, bearing in mind that in a setting as large as New Eden there will be exceptions, and I hope it answers your question.
DZ
(* strictly speaking the capsule and clone breakthrough was in YC104 but it pretty much didn’t roll out as a mature tech until YC105 and of course independent capsuleers date from May YC105.)
