Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Good morning,

I'd like first to say that this is not a "ECM is broken" or a new complaint about "why am I perma-jammed?" post.
I just wish to understand the mechanics of how ECM modules would work in a real environment, and maybe raise some ideas.

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That being said, let me give you a situation:

I am a fleet inty pilot. We gather a small gang, I start skirmishing and find 2-3 juicy targets at a belt. I start spiralling, point a ship and call in reinforcements. Then, after a few seconds, my friend come on field and call a second point. Nice! I can focus on another target!

A Falcon lands on the field, 100+ km off the fleet, and starts jamming the hell out of our other tacklers... "I'm burning towards the Falcon" - "POINT!" - "Point lost... I'm jammed... oh, and again... and again...".

Of course, at that point, what I'm doing is orbiting the Falcon, opening the forums, reading the newspaper, watching what's on TV... I'm totally useless.

Don't give up yet! As I stated, this is NOT a complaint about being perma-jammed!

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Let's imagine how it would work in real life:

An "antenna" (or whatever you call it) sends waves of ECM towards a target, which confuses the targeting computer which prevents it to work correctly. In my mind, there are only 3 possibilities of how the waves are emitted:

1. The "antenna" send ECM waves all around the ship on which it is mounted.
2. The ECM waves are emitted in a cone in a specific direction.
3. The "antenna" has to follow the target to send focused waves of ECM.

The first asumption would break the targeting computers of every ship around the emitter, so that doesn't seem to be how it works in reality.

The second one would mean that, according to the distance from the emitter to the target, the cone would catch multiple ships. The more distance there's between the 2 ships, the larger the end of the cone would be. It also doesn't make sense...

So, I assume the third option is the answer: focused waves of ECM are sent to a specific target, to jam its computer.

According to that, let's try to find a real life way to simulate this:
You take a walk in the park with a laser pen in your pocket, and then you see a bird on the ground at 20m. You decide to try to point it, and actually you succeed, it's not moving... Suddenly, the bird starts to fly in your direction, and starts to fly around you at 1m (silly birds). You still try to point the laser at it, and sure, you're be able to catch it once or twice, but how hard it is to keep your laser pointed at this mighty foe!!

People are going to tell me "sure! but I'm not a computer, I cannot predict the bird's movements" or even "It moves too fast compared to a space ship orbiting at 20km!". I admit, this might not be the best example, but remember that we're 1 billion times smaller than the ships we fly, and the bird flies 1 billion times slower (no, I didn't make the exact calculation )...

So, according to this example, let's translate it to EVE:
The "antenna" is pointed at an interceptor which is bothering your friends. You are sitting in a Falcon at 100km. Without trouble, you jam its targeting computer. That target then decides to close range, and to orbit you at 20km... flying at 4+ km/s...

How can your antenna follow its movements? It's a big machine, with a big inertia (like guns), and sure, it'll sometimes catch that annoying "bird" flying around you, but will it be able to follow ALL of its movements? I'm not sure about it...

Finally then, I have to ask: why isn't there any tracking issue to ECM jams? Shouldn't it work more like the guns which are having trouble following such an annoying bug?

Let me know what you all think about this, and please accept my apologies if I made spelling mistakes or even if I made mistakes in the mechanics of ECM.

Fly safe,
Gecko

Player skill comes into play in making sure 1. You can live long enough to apply that 1 successful jam. and 2. survive his buddies jumping in. So just stop it with your fail-player BS.