Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The units used to measure tracking, radian/sec, are too large for use in EVE. This means that trying to estimate hit quality using your guns devolves into a game of counting zeros. If you have a gun that tracks at 0.0232 radians/sec, the difference between your target going 0.0652 or 0.0065 radian/sec is difficult to discern at a glance, even though the hit quality will be worlds different. It's equivalent to using kilometers to measure someone's height. We don't go around saying this person is 0.0018 kilometers tall; we say that this person is 1.8 meters tall or even 180 centimeters tall.

I propose that we shift the decimal place over 3 places and use milliradians/sec instead of radians/sec. Taking the example above, our gun would track at 23.2 mils/sec. The difference between our target moving at 65.2 mils/sec vs 6.5 mils/sec would be much easier to differentiate. This would mean changing the units in the showinfo window, and more importantly, under the angular velocity column in our overviews.

The world's militaries adopted the use of milliradians (NATO mils) for use in artillery tracking/targeting long ago for this express purpose. In the futuristic world of EVE, I can't imagine we would discard such a useful unit.

I was going to write something akin to a rebuttal, but then I noticed that I hadn't noticed the extra zero, proving your point absolutely right…

So yeah, sure. But why not expand on it? Why do all the work of changing show-info numbers when it's not really there the problem lies, but with the overview and the need to quickly discern between numbers there? Why not let us set a scaling factor on any of the numerical columns in the overview.

Add a selection dropdown for “speeds always be measured in km/s or always in m/s, or dynamic (as is the case right now)”… oh, and a reversal option for radial speed — I want closing speed to be positive, not negative. Same for ranges. Yes, suddenly that gate will show as being …20 000 km away (with a whole bunch of numbers cut off at the beginning) rather than 40 AU, but that's ok — i just need to be able to tell that it's not really on this grid.

Are radians/s really the best tool to use for the job of measuring angular direction? Would degrees/second work better?

The reason to use radians over degrees is that radians actually mean something and are SI units, degrees is just "1/360th of a circle" and doesn't actually have any real basis.

It's the same reason Eve uses the metric system everywhere else, they're the international standard units.

Umm, a radian and a degree measure the same thing. 1 radian = pi/180 degrees

However, both the radian and the degree are accepted under the SI system.

Utilizing radians in the tracking algorithm makes a lot of sense since it is mathematically based, but as a display unit, it is not as easy for a human unaccustomed to using radians to understand the relative angle.

Why not just use a decimal version of tau at that point (tau == 2*pi which is a full circle)?

Which is why I never said to remove keeping them internally in the tracking formula. However, in my opinion, it is trivial to convert the radian/s value to degrees/s which is easier for the majority of people to handle and while moving the decimal point two places, it would provide per the example above

.0652 radians = 3.73 ...... degrees
.00652 radians = .373..... degrees

I would contend that mils/sec are also a better display measurement because there are less 0's to count before the interesting number and to me 20.2 mils is much easier to remember than .00202 radians.

You've all got it wrong.

There is one true unit for measuring angles.

Gradians.

Yes, that's another good idea that should be implemented. A dropdown menu for the directional scanner, giving us the option to use kilometers or astronomical units, would be a godsend.