CCP Fozzie, Lore Dev?

I don't normally cruise the Eve Online forums.  I'll stick my head in every once in a while to see if anyone is talking about bots but normally I only read the dev blogs and the reactions.  But watching Twitter I've heard about some of CCP Fozzie's forum posts as he gathers up player feedback on the frigate and cruiser changes.  I really liked his response to some outrage over the changes to the Tristan.

Outrages player 1:  

NO NO and again NO

i will NOT support that dicision

i am willing to support the idea where the --> Kestrel, Iquisitor, Breacher and my favorite hull-design the Tristan <-- are rocket-/light missile platforms obviously because they are the tech 1 variations of the Covertt-Ops-Bombers and seriously ... what is a drone tracking bonus for when u use small drones??? and as simple as that: DO NOT MAKE THEM INTO SOME OTHER STRANGE STUFF

Outraged player 2:  

Are you ********? It doesn't make sense, so simply put, they should fix it. It does not make ANY SENSE AT ALL. WHY THE HECK ARE YOU THINKING THIS IS A GOOD THING?

I like the drone boat thing and love the look of the new Tristan... it's just too bad it doesn't make one ******* shred of sense for the Tristan to be the Tech 1 drone boat frigate, while an Incursus hull gets to be the Tech 2 version. This is common sense that a five year old possesses, it's called a pattern, and the way they're proposing this stuff right now, that pattern is GARBAGE.

That is unless they are planning some major changes with the Gallente Assault Ships.

CCP Fozzie:  

Well you see there's a funny story about all this.

Back in YC 105 when CreoDron was beginning the design process for their new Ishkur-class Assault Ship, they naturally looked first to the (retroactively) drone-centric Tristan as a base hull. The project lead Masalle Ambrette acquired a large number of Tristan hulls for prototyping and set her team to work.

However two major technical challenges quickly arose. Roni Darieux himself had given them their design targets, and he was adamant that the new ship had to be the pinnacle of drone carrier technology. The Ishkur must be able to field a 50m3 dronebay as well as top of the line armor plating for a Frigate.

These goals proved difficult to meet using the Tristan as a base hull. Although it had the largest dronebay of any existing Frigate at the time the Tristan's hull layout did not allow for easy expansion of the already significant bay. In particular, the port side bulkhead quickly lost structural integrity when the internal supports were scaled back in order to expand the bay. Attempts to meet the armor plating requirements also ran into difficulties as the Tristan thruster systems struggled to keep up under the heavier load. The classic thruster pod design of the Tristan hull did not provide easy expansion room to upgrade the thrusters either.

After numerous failures in the prototyping process the CreoDron team decided to change course and build the Ishkur using a completely different hull. They eventually settled on the Incursus hull as the next logical choice. Although the Incursus did not have the same base dronebay that the Tristan offered, it was more easily modified and the conversion from the Incursus' advanced armor repair systems to the Ishkur's superior resistance and plating systems proceeded relatively smoothly. As a bonus, the team was able to carry over the Incursus' superior hybrid weapon damage boosting technology and create another strong selling point for their new Assault Ship.

Although the Ishkur project resulted in what would prove to be an extremely successful ship (in both direct ship sales and additional profits from increased use of CreoDron's advanced drone portfolio), Masalle Ambrette was left afterwards with thousands of mangled Tristan hulls that had failed the prototyping process. In order to recoup some of the development costs, CreoDron sold the hulls cheap as scrap to the highest bidder.

They say one woman's trash is another woman's treasure, and when CreoDron put the 'scrap' onto the market one smart scientist saw a diamond in the rough. Ruborraude Eyghelet, a rising star at Duvolle Laboratories, had just been recently put in charge of a top secret development project on contract from the Federation Navy. Her team was designing what would eventually come to be known as the Nemesis stealth bomber, a dramatic departure from normal Gallente battle doctrines that would help keep them competitive in the battlefields of the future. Eyghelet knew that the Nemesis would need to be a radical departure from previous frigate designs, but building a new hull design completely from scratch would take a portion of her limited budget that she could not afford to lose. When the report of the mangled Tristan fire-sale crossed her desk she immediately saw an opportunity to cut her costs.

The damaged Tristan hulls were reformed into a barely recognizable state during the prototyping process to accommodate the battleship sized missile launchers and bomb deployment system, with only the iconic front plating remaining to visually connect it to the frigate it had once been. The dronebay was converted into a bomb and missile storage bay, and the Duvolle team also managed to ingeniously convert the advanced tracking computer on the Tristan into an efficient missile guidance system. In the end Duvolle and Eyghelet managed to create the Nemesis while keeping costs down to only 14% overbudget, easily beating the market predictions and sending Duvolle stock to the highest it had reached in years.

It just goes to prove that the world of spaceship construction is more complicated and fascinating than any of us would expect.

Is CCP developing lore for all the changes?  Probably not but I really enjoyed Kirith Kodachi's Project Athena and would love to see CCP give us some background on all the ships we fly.