Sunday 7 June 2015

A Million Ways To Die...

“The cosmic environment is uniformly deadly and is particularly unforgiving of carelessness. There are a multitude of methods by which a capsuleer may be killed while undertaking flight operations other than ship-to-ship combat. A few examples:

Structural failure - design flaw, exceeding of design limitations (inadvertent interface with planetary atmosphere is unacceptably common), docking accidents (collision) incorrect maintenance, load factor imbalance and overload.
Power failure - reactor core breach, reactor structural failure, inadvertent criticality, intermix proportion irregularity, magnetic containment failure, bulkhead overtemp, warp core imbalance, capacitor failure.
Specific system failure - flight control mechanism runaway, thruster combo mismatch and failure (imbalance?), nanobot rebellion, stellar environment protection failure (stellar flare - cooked inside their capsule), capsule integration failure**, life-support system failure (more commonly fatal to crewed starships as capsules have independent provision), weapons system malfunction. AI/CPU malfeasance.
Navigational error - incorrect warp formation causing either mid-warp bosonic reduction or large course inaccuracies (sometimes on the order of light-years) resulting in collision with a cosmic object.
Capsuleer liability - illness, psychosis, mind-lock, wet-graving, schizophrenia through prolonged immersion, inadequate training and skill level.

**note: documented evidence indicates several instances of capsule integration failure causing ships to coast indefinitely into interstellar space on a fixed heading, effectively because the ship waits for a command that never arrives. Suicide is presumed although not always observed. Recovery ops are frequently impractical. The assumption is that in several millennia from now these ships will eventually arrive in another system and be investigated.”


Zafarara Fari - “Responding to Emergent Threats: The Next Generation of Capsuleer Doctrine”, Royal Amarr Navy Library, Hedion University Lecture Series.