Warfare & Tactics

It's a perfectly valid tactic, but still, I wouldn't put too many TBH. CCP can be a bit... inconsistent with their rulings on things and it's best to err on the side of caution.

It shouldn't be too hard to figure out the number of cans you need - ships spawn on the surface of a sphere 18km from the gate. Each can must be within 2500 meters of a cloaked ship to decloak them - which means the cans must be 4750 meters apart (technically 5000 but you want some overlap to ensure good coverage). From there it's just figuring out the surface area of the sphere and dividing it by 4750.

I don't understand why renaming cans can get you in trouble? Unless really long names destabilize the node?

Yep.

And I didn't know about the lag, haven't experienced it before. If you're intentionally doing it to lag someone out, yeah I'd say it's ban worthy. If it's just to decloak, no. But you can't really differentiate between the two. Honestly I'd just ask a GM and see what they say.

My experience is this:
Someone loses thier ship and they use your cans as an exuse. (Could be a legit issue) They petition. A GM will contact you and give you a specified time to "remove your assets". If you do not remove them the polite response would be to ask the GM to please remove them for you. *POOF* assets removed.

Our cans were not Decloak cans btw. but anchored cans that formed messages in space. The petitions were about the lag this caused for ppl loading grid.

Alright.
I want to maximise my chances of catching cloakys, without causing lag.
Any idea on number of cans?

LOL, excellent answer. I wouldn't know even how to work that out. Love it :-)

Surface Area of a Sphere is 4πr^2. You pop into a system 15km from the gate, which is a Sphere of varying size (regional gates can be like 20km or something nutty like that).

So, Surface area to seed with cans is 4π(15+Gate Size)^2 km. Each Can covers a Surface area of 2π(2.5)^2 km.

Assuming they tessellate perfectly (they don't), and the gate is 5km (I think the smallest gate is like 7.5km, but I don't remember), you need 128 cans to cover a small gate.

For a 7.5km gate, you need 162 cans.

For a 20km regional gate, you'd need 392 cans.

Again, this is assuming you can nest circles perfectly into each other with no overlap (they don't), and assuming you're trying to catch something with a size of 0 (the ship model sphere is what the game measures when cloaking, so you need fewer cans if you're trying to catch a BS than if you're after a Frigate.

Figuring out how big the gaps would be, and how many cans you'd need to fill those gaps requires you to have fun with more advanced math, or just double it.

Setting them up perfectly would be a royal pain and probably take you the better part of a day, just to see it wiped away after DT.

I'd assume they'd get wiped at DT because jetcans don't survive DTs.

No, there is no single maximum "allowed" number. 100 cans might get you in trouble. 500 cans will very likely get you in trouble. The resolution depends on the GM dealing with it, what you're doing with the cans, and how can you justify it. 50 cans should be fine. Do you put them on a drag bubble? Do you put them aligned to celestials? Do you put them at jump in range? Or do you just randomly cover the entire grid with them? And obviously, if there is nobody around to petition the cans, there is no way the GMs will know about it.

How do you get the cans to cloak in the first place?