Highspeed Life and Piracy

The Eve Cluster has a funny sense of time. Everything between the 4 Empires has been hyper-accelerated over the last 10 or 15 years, from trade to war. Trade orders generally get filled in one ‘day’ cycle in what took at least a month before hand. Wars quickly flare up between corporations and alliances and die right back down. Even the biggest alliances waging their wars take only months now…in what used to take decades to resolve.

Successful alliances and corporations can vanish in a blink of an eye…something most have just come to accept as life in the Cluster.

The pod pilot charter is the reason for this hyper-activeness that has changed the course of even common civilians planetside. As pod pilots are often treated as demi-gods, you would think the Empires would reign in their power…but the economic benefits of this accelerated time we live in far outweigh any perceived threat in the future.

It also lends itself to pod pilot burnout at rapidly increasing rates…especially among combat pilots.

Since the DNA pattern cloning was instituted, it has changed the basic human culture among pod pilots. With no fear of death, our exploits and decisions go from daring to suicidal…at least for our unlucky crew that could not make it to the escape pods. Keeping combat pilots in a professional mercenary organization becomes a huge issue as well…as when there is downtime between contracts, the most audacious of pilots continually want to engage targets. This leads many ‘mercenaries’ down the path of piracy in short order.

While we have in our charter a no piracy clause, the ability to retain good combat pilots is almost always the cost. LSD is no different than any other organization in this regards, as it can be quite profitable to blow up random trade shipping going through low security space.

I turn away at least 90% of applications to my corporation the OEC as most pilots looking to join automatically assume we pirate during off contract times. At this rate, I could have built two MC class organizations, but stubbornness is said to be one of my character flaws.

Still, we will not change our policies in this area…and I will keep encouraging my guys during off contract times to in fact hunt down pod pirates instead of joining them. This is the true ‘Big Game’ of the Eve Cluster and can be very rewarding in terms of combat experience and valuable salvage. Most pilots that just want to shoot at stuff cannot be saved from a life of piracy no matter how many accommodations are made, and if they find piracy unsuccessful they generally retire their charters.

Eve is definitely a brutal and unforgiving world…with a pace that only seems to get faster as time rolls on.