Warfare & Tactics

double post

Orbiting increases your transversal, minimising the amount you get hit if the opponent has weapons with tracking (and / or lower tracking speed).

Keep at range minimises transversal, but maintains distance better, so can be used to maximise your own damage with weapons that use tracking, or where you just want to concentrate on maintaining distance.

Keep At Range and Orbit are directly related to the mechanics of Optimal Range+Falloff and Tracking Speed. For most brawls, you pick the one you're better at and work from there.

if you outrange the opponent and you have slow tracking guns you don't want to orbit to maximize your damage.

If you are kiting, and your guns have horrid tracking (most rail boats) then keep at range is superior. If you sport guns with fantastic tracking at range (pulse lasers) then orbit is preferable. As Clahim said, if you are fighting drone boats, orbiting will force his drones to MWD and catch back up to you, causing many misses from then and therefore mitigated damage. I personally don't use those buttons a whole lot, as I find manual control of my ship far superior. If I find a situation in which I am traveling too fast to manual pilot well, then I rely on the auto-commands.

Try both and figure out what works best for whichever ship(s) you fly.

Good luck!

Really depends on target and what weapons you are using against it! Are you going to be able to hold point too.
I use both but focus on what target ship is doing, plus if you know he has something like scram or web to avoid etc. Sometimes you an get aay with just an orbit if target is slow or when u see he can't track. another thing is your cap, if you are buzzing around will you run out of cap?

I believe you mean "slingshat".

Keep at range : Good for keeping range with long range fits, when you know you can beat them in a slugging match, and if you are against a blaster boat and you are keeping 10KM range with a scram/web.

Orbit : All else.

Well SOME if not MOST pilots will ONLY use "Orbit" as default for skirmishing. Even less try to do ALL manual piloting and find that in scaled engagements with multiple targets spatial awareness is a problem. Which is because manual piloting is more talk than anything else as far as being truly applicable to combat.

I use a combination of "orbit", "keep at range", and "manual piloting". For me it works out to be something like 40%, 35, and 25% manual piloting. In some cases based on a really difficult engagement it will ONLY be keep at range and manual piloting.

To put things into context. Keep it range moves your ship directly perpendicular to the ship you're targeting. I often use this to bring down transversal in a Talos or Oracle against an incoming frigate for example. While "orbiting" is just what it sound like. You orbit a ship or whatever else on your overview at a pre-input range. Manual piloting is more about quick reactions and compensating for the former 2 mechanics.

Umm!

Real game example of a difficult engagement where the level of spatial awareness and reaction of a pilot is limited:

You are a pro solo pilot and you find yourself engaging 4 ships with varying capabilities and pilot experience/skill. You're in a Talos and your relative velocity and damage projection/application is superior to all ships involved. Using a combination of keep it range, orbiting and manual piloting you are able to keep at least one ship pointed and apply damage to it. When one moves into a position where it may be able to catch you. You drop point on your current target, target the other ship and hit keep it range. Moving you away from the current incoming ship and keeping the engagement in tact. Now you can hit orbit in this kind of engagement without running into another ship and sometimes doing so will protect you from incoming ships or someone warping to some object directly behind you and landing on you. Now you never really know where someone is warping in from most of the time and whelp v0v. In this example that bad thing aforementioned happens and 1 of the total 4 ships is coming in. You have to act while its coming out of warp before it can react it self. You can either to that manually and often when I do this I get it horribly wrong esp in split second decisions. In any case when something is coming in I'm already overheating if i can and moving away from my current targets until I'm able to to establish the relative positions, velocity and damage projection/application of all ships on grid. So, I'm now 35k from the other 2 and the other dude has just came in and he is 12 km from where I am. I hit "keep it range" in this situation and it moves me away from the incoming ship in ANY direction perpendicular to said ship. From there i can make any compensation manually to help out but the immediate is to move away from the other ship that has nearly caught me in the wrong position. I now see the last ship incoming to and i have to make the same compensation. at some point I regroup and re-engage.

The above happens to me a lot from frigates to battlecruisers. So yeah! There's a limit to how many ships you can react to at a given distance and avoid. It's really like dancing in fact. It's also a lot easier when you have an overheated web to stiff arm dudes and sh!t.

So yeah! Use all of them and you'll be better for it. Know your ship as well as its limits and your opponents limits.