EVE General Discussion

Any of you who have lived in nullsec much have probably heard a titan or supercarrier pilot tell fleet members to be extremely careful not to bump the titan out of the safety of the POS bubble. Those of you who haven't witnessed that have still probably had some experience with bumping ships around in some capacity. As you may have noticed, a tiny, lightweight frigate can bump a battleship around pretty good. Not as well as another battleship perhaps, but far better than a tiny frigate ought to be able to.

I believe that a ships bumping ability should be a direct computation of its mass x its velocity at impact. If it were that way, a frigate (about 1,500,000kg with prop mod running) slamming into a battleship (about 100,000,000kg) at 3000m/s would push the battleship a whole 45m/s before the frigate was completely stopped. In fact, if you want to get really realistic, the frigate bouncing off the battleship would keep some of the impact momentum inside the frigate. The battleship might be pushed 22.5m/s, while the frigate might be bounced off at 1500m/s.

Not only does that make sense, but it would make the game a bit more "fair" if you will. Too often, players take advantage of this magic bumping effect and use a lot of small, cheap ships to bump a very large and expensive ship (many times the combined worth of the ships bumping it) and move it into a tactically critical position or for other offense reasons. Making ships mass and velocity directly affecting bumping power would force ship bumpers to put something more expensive at risk in order to get the job done. It would also decrease a lot of supercapital pilots' risk of heart attack.

After all, isn't that what EVE is about? Killing expensive targets with expensive targets? I'm all in favor of waking up the sleeping masses and showing them that EVE is a dark and cruel universe that will show no mercy for complacency. Therefore, just as I like to see vapid carebears lose their ridiculously expensive ships that they don't know how to defend, I also like to see certain complacent pirates learn the hard way that cheap tricks do not make you an expert at PVP.

Thank you, that is all.

Then the frigate would in fact explode on impact and there would be no silly magnet bounce crap going on. Titans would have probably even have their own gravitational pull affecting nearby objects.

Now why would you want to use an extremely simple, fundamental equation from physics like that?

Wouldn't it be soooo much easier to come up with a probably extremely complex and easily breakable equation like CCP uses?

Maybe our ships have avoidance mechanisms...

Thats why we gain velocity, but take no damage at all...

The ship itself has self preservation mechanisms to avoid impact...

Not that far fetched really

I dint read the OP (sorry, it looked long and, well, long) but bumping is stupid. I mean, whats that all about? Being able to bump a huge freighter out of alignment by ramming it. That would mean death and destruction to the small ship and a little damage to the freighter.

I know, I know, the undock carnage at jita, the wrecks strewn all over pretty much everywhere etc etc. But teh answer shoudl never have been a ridiculous thing like bumping. Bumping is stupid. May as well just let ships fly through each other and ignore the reality aspect, since bumping is actually just as dumb anyway and would no longer be a usable (ridicluous) tactic in pvp.

And before the mandatory "Who bumped and killed you, you mad bro, you seem angry" Dont bother, bumping is also a tactic I actually use against people becasue it is there. I just think its dumb.

perhaps with the idea of a new graphics update that introduced some addition phyics (asteroids bumping and shattering) and *fingers crossed* no more "bound boxes" we can hope for a bit more realism and yes, less bumping.

Although bumping people can be extremely funny, until somebody loses an eye :(.

I love me some shield on shield action.

I agree with the OP. Massive ships should be only be effected slightly by tiny ships bumping them. The ships with massive mass should move only slightly, and the small ship should be thrown much further. I think this is one of the most unrealistic things about eve, right up there with the whole "warping through planets and stuff".

Bumping is pretty standard tactic against massive ships now, to the point of abuse imo. Though i wouldn't hold my breath that it would be changed, i would sure welcome it, and i'm sure physics would too.

An actual physics formula used correctly in my EVE!?
Impossible! Unimaginable!

While it would be nice to have more physics realism in Eve, there are some sacrifices made for having working game mechanics. That's why bumping isn't crashing (and taking damage). Bumping also works the way it is because it is currently the only really reliable way to counter station docking games (ram them off of the station) or gate games. Until the "unrealism" of a ship being able to suddenly dock into a station as it has tens of guns shooting it gets replaced by a realistic mechanic, bumping shouldn't be made more realistic.

I say this as a lowsec resident who deals with bumping as a tactic very often. It's annoying and not how things should work, but without it a lot of stuff would be broken.