And defend against or go on the offensive against capsuleers, both of which is very much not an option without them.
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That doesn’t mean they’re not doing better with capsuleers. Warfare has been a thing for a while. I don’t know if you picked up on that? I’m quite certain that it was prosecuted pretty effectively without us. It’s not like we’ve really changed the shape of the Empires by our existence. We’ve just made certain conflicts more efficient…and created an entire area of warfare exclusively involving us. Which wouldn’t exist without us. The net impact on humanity essentially being relatively null.
Well, not null, I’m sure there’s economical impacts but I’m not certain that if we all vanished tomorrow people would be sitting around saying to themselves “If only those capsuleers were still fighting each other in null space.”
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Well-- unless your surname is “Tyrannos,” maybe?
Hee. Quite possibly they wouldn’t, though I’m not sure that means we’re useless, or that our place in this world is accidental.
The legal regime governing us is really, really strange. Someone had to have thought it was a good idea to have so many privately-held weapons of mass destruction wandering around.
(I don’t claim to understand why.)
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Oh Aria, did I say we were useless or accidental? No, I simply said that we’re more than simply weapons, that we don’t have to focus our existence on being weapons and that we don’t have to spend our lives in an eternal pissing contest to see who is the best weapon they absolutely can be and that our capability to be efficient weapons should not be defining our outlook.
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Well said. I consider reveling in the concept of “we’re just weapons” as a huge limiting factor of our potential, not an empowering one.
Of course, people are free to disagree.
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Among non-capsuleers, wars are more commonly begun over objectives. Leaders don’t throw away billions of lives because ‘my soldiers were bored’. Capsuleers do. We indulge ourselves in whatever ways we get the urge to, from building ridiculous monuments to our own hubris, to slaughtering millions in a day for ‘fun’.
And then we tell ourselves how ‘this is what we’re for’, like we don’t decide on our purpose anew, every moment. At some point, all of the strident insistence that ‘this is what we’re for’ keeps making me wonder: who are you trying to convince? Us? Or yourselves?
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“It’s not my fault, I was made for this.”
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I’m not sure I was saying that we had to compete to be the best weapon or that we had to focus on it. Some things happen whether you mean them to or not. A military scientist might be far more focused on interactions between subatomic particles than on making big explosions, but … it might be a little important for such a person to understand that their work is likely to be used to turn someone into a permanent shadow on a shattered bulkhead.
… if only so that it doesn’t come as a big shock when it happens.
Oh, we’re definitely not just weapons.
We’re also human beings, for a start. People who might have been considered “weapons” in the past have had broad existences outside of that category … in spite of which it’s also understandable (in maybe a sad way) if society, and especially its highest reaches, treated them as disposable tools.
People sometimes talk about us, and we talk about ourselves, like we’re immortals, fated to live forever. The opposite seems more likely to me.
As a group, we’re a terribly destructive force. At the end, if the time comes when we’re no longer necessary for whatever reason, will we really be allowed to just lead peaceful lives?
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You may not be, but it’s an identifiable trend.
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Egg-zactly.
Capsuleers are captains of combat vehicles.
I am sick of these pretenders, “do-gooders”, pacifists… From my point of view, they are the worst kind of capsuleers (well, if we won’t discuss CDS ones - but that’s not really their fault, just an affliction), because by their pretending of being “moral”, they simply mask their own amorality and incompetence, they are waste of resources the corporations spent on their training.
Why a sane person would waste YEARS and YEARS of their life for training just to use these combat ships if they aren’t going to use them?
You don’t need to be a capsuleer to become an industrial magnate.
You don’t need to be a capsuleer to get a freighter and do logistics.
You don’t need to be a capsuleer to buy a ship and explore space (in fact, the newest region opened - Black Rise, was explored by baseliners, not capsuleers).
You definitely don’t need to be a capsuleer to become a trader and play on markets.
But you MUST become a capsuleer if you want to join the best WARRIORS of our cluster, the elite of the fighting class. If you need access to the most powerful war machines the humankind have constructed, you need to be a capsuleer.
And if you are a young pilot, who have just touched the hydrostatic capsule, it means larger part of your life you have been training just for that day. When they discard their life like that to be “pacifists”, it just means they are utter failures.
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It’s not about enjoying fighting, it’s how you do it, and whether something is at stake. Defensive posture is a thing, and it’s starkly different than the “go kill” philosophy of old. Yet, it’s the better, winningier model now.
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I dunno Miss Kim. I always thought that being a capsuleer was a neat security clausule so that you don’t tecnically cease to be once someone or something eventualy explodinates your spaceship!
And I pretty much like existing! Even if it is in the form of an informorph program inside a human-shape wetware!
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That is a tremendous amount of misspellings. I applaudinate your effortness, be it accidentialize or on purposely.
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Once again you prove how narrowminded you are. Sure becomming capsuleer is mainly for combat role, however you can still gain a massive power without focusing on your combat capabilities.
The nullsec empires need their industrial backbone and their freighters otherwise they had nothing to fight with.
It is the explorers who are going into anoikis who allow us to field T3 technology.
It was a trader / casino owner who funded the war that kicked the Imperium out of the North.
It’s true that you don’t have to be a capsuleer for these roles but it grants you massive powers and advantages over baseliners. And for some capsuleers they can easier achieve their goals and gain influence by not becoming a figther.
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It is not a case for me of what I may or may not want, but what may or not be. A future war appears to me a most likely outcome, as such I will prepare and make myself ready for its prosecution.
How my words might make you feel does not have the same correlation with my intent behind them.
Yes, any future war will be won by the qualitative and quantitative metrics of national industry and the efficient logistic supply chains of personnel and war materiel for front-line units.
My role as I see it at present is simply to ensure an effective personal qualitative standard in which I am able to increase my own ability at destruction both in terms of bodycount and asset loss versus a potential adversary that would inflict a higher rate of loss than myself. In order to achieve that qualitative standard requires experience, and such experience demands a price in blood which I am willing to pay.
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Sub-warp racing then? 
Also, there is that say-it-in-poetry thread somewhere that could be use more.
I was thinking about having you discover this by being at Gottin’s Lamp in that costume.
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Sure, why not. Precise piloting requires skill.
Just ignore Kim-baka.
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Well, compared to some I am.
Also, it has been suggested that I’m so enormous that there’s a frigate in my pants.
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Yes! On purpose! That’s what it was!
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There are doctors who can treat that.
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