EVE New Citizens Q&A

Note for rookies passing thru chokepoint systems like Rancer: smartbombs have really short range. The smartbomb ship positions himself on a gate directly in the warp path to another gate so his weapon can hit you as you drop out of warp. It will only hit you if you warped directly from gate to gate. If you warp to his gate from another angle, he will miss, because gates are large. One way to avoid being smartbombed (other than not to go to that system at all) is this: when you enter system,
* open your map;
* set it on solar system view;
* find your exit gate on the map;
* check the path between your location and your exit gate;
* find a different celestial that's not in line with that path;
* warp to that celestial first before warping to the exit gate.
* Note if that celestial is a moon, there might be a hostile tower anchored there which will try to shoot you. You will need to warp away fast before the tower gets a lock!

If the exit gate is really far from everything, try warping in at long range first to check for hostiles. You can also try to scan the gate with directional scan to see if there is a smartbomb ship (it will always be a battleship, as they can fit the most smartbomb punch) lurking there. You can get yourself into scan range of a far-off gate without actually warping all the way there by rapidly initiating warp and then canceling warp over and over to deplete your capacitor, then finally taking the warp when the ship's computer says "not enough capacitor to go all the way to destination." This will do a short warp that drops you at a safespot nearer to the gate.

Two comments about this:

* When you "change ships" into a pod you acquire a 10-sec session timer, to keep the server in sync, which prevents you from doing any action that would give a session timer. This includes activating stargates, docking, boarding a new ship, entering a wormhole, and so forth. So it "seemed like an age" before the stargate would accept your request because it literally took at least ten seconds. During that time if the hostile had had a weapon other than a smartbomb (and a sensor booster - a battleship takes a while to lock a pod) he could have just shot you. As another poster said above, because of the session timer it's always better to warp away from the scene if your ship founders near a gate, rather than try to jump through the gate.

EDIT you can see your session timer, when you have one, as a little analog clock counting down in the top left of your screen near the system name. Or if it's not appearing, you can enable it somewhere in the ESC menu settings.

* Why your pod didn't die: it's possible the hostile wasn't interested in a rookie pod, because it probably wasn't worth anything to brag about on the killboard; a pod doesn't drop loot; and killing a pod in losec gives you an annoyingly large security status drop. It's also possible that his smartbombs just didn't cycle around fast enough to fire again; but this seems unlikely as the duty cycle on a large smartbomb is also 10 seconds, so you would have escaped by the narrowest of server-tick margins.

This^^
My wife was making fun of me last night for being on teamspeak with a crew of grown men, who had to keep it down because we all have sleeping kids. I tried to explain to her the complexity of the sandbox, the tumultuous political system, the fragile & dynamic market, the fractured alliances constantly warring over resources. She seemed interested for almost a millisecond. Not long enough to sub...but I could see it in her eyes.

Much as it pains me to admit I was owned by a ‘bottom feeder’, I see your point.

One hole in your theory though: Goons! I defy anyone to come up with a single use for a goon…

Yep. Just a joke. No trolling intended.

Smartbombs won't activate if you are the smartbombs max range or closer to space furniture, so stations, gates etc. Shame really. You could have sat and taunted him and he could do nothing providing he didn't have drones..

Without Goons:

No Hulkageddon - All minerals will drop in price cause bots aren't shot down - Economy crashes.
No Tech regulation - T2 market will crash.
And of course the publicity of EVE. Without Goons, no drunk leader at fanfest

I thought he got banned for trying to get some poor guy to commit suicide?