The Chronicle "Hands of a Killer" (http://www.eveonline.com/background/potw/default.asp?cid=14-07-05) explicitly says that the crew is replaceable. And with the thousands of habitable planets with each one's population numbering in the billions, I don't doubt it. That's a very large recruitment pool for half a million capsuleers.

A fair fight means that someone made a mistake, and according to your story, they avoided making that mistake. They're learning already.

Also, population limits don't really help with lag being used as a strategy, it only makes the problem worse. If a system has a population cap of 800 players, the superpower stuffing it with 600 players will be able to utterly crush any opposition trying to jump in, because the opposition can only have the remaining 200 "slots", and thus always face 3-to-1 odds.

Also, population caps on alliances wouldn't amount to much. Having to fight Goonswarm1, Goonswarm2 and Goonswarm3 instead of Goonswarm isn't much of an improvement.

My hunch: Unintended consequence of switching doomsday weapons from AoE to single-target coupled with several wars starting up. Now that you don't have diminishing returns from bringing lots of people, every side in a conflict will bring every warm body available to a fight. Especially when you can effectively lag out your opponent if you get enough people into the system first.

They did. The idea was that sending only one message instead of eight per cycle/toggling would reduce traffic and thus reduce lag. Unfortunately, it also means that the client doesn't sync it's state as often with the server. If you're in an Amarr ship fighting something that lasts more than a few seconds it's all fine and dandy, but most of the time fleet combat involves focus fire and targets tend to be dead before the next weapon cycle begins. And you can't start firing on the next target if your client still thinks that your guns are still shooting at the previous guy or reloading.

To fight that kind of lag, fleet commanders sometimes instruct their troops to cycle their guns after each shot. Even if only some of those messages gets through, it means that at least a portion of the fleet is actually firing and doing damage to the opponent instead of just waiting for their clients to catch up. It's the classic tragedy of the commons dilemma. Because it's so beneficial to take more than your "fair share" of server bandwidth, it makes sense for every individual to do it, making the lag problem even worse.

That's a nice roundup of the specialized roles in fleet combat. However, one should be careful when fighting strawmen, for they occassionally pack a mean punch. Like in this case, where the majority of your fleet (70 out of 110) was doing exactly what the naysayers said they would.

The more time I spend in 0.0, the more I like it. As you settle in, you start to appreciate the freedom, safety and stability, especially with a NBSI policy. One can evaluate the safety of a gate, a system, a constellation or a region by simply glancing at the intel channel. Most of the time, you know everyone on Local.

One other thing to remember about nullsec is that while the income is good, it's also insubstantial until you get an opportunity to spend it. A few billion in your wallet won't do you any good unless you can exchange it to a nice ship. If you've lived in low/highsec for a while where market forces take care of logistics, this fact can hit quite hard and see those miners/industrialist in a completely new light. You never truly appreciate something until you've lost it.

And even if you have managed to have all your stuff delivered to you, you might get cut off from a POS or a station with billions in assets and have no choice but to write them off as losses or sell them at bargain prices to your foes. This can be quite disillusioning at times. This is a stark contrast to high/lowsec where you never can lose something unless you explicitly put it on the line yourself.