Warfare & Tactics

@ Bethesda Vortarhiat, I gave you a +1 because you are foreign, I don't know if disliking English people counts as racist, because I am English, but I can assure you I am defiantly sexist, I only beat on men and only kiss women.

I deserve to be spanked, hard, many, many times, by a foreign woman of course.

Now your talking my language :))

I also remember the not hitting at 0 range bug. Supposedly CCP was able to replicate it and made a patch as the problem could conceivably affect other areas. But the actual problem was never corrected to total satisfaction. Thus, you and your friend are experiencing one of the joys of Eve. Bugs. Feel free to report it.

Artillery have pretty poor tracking. Any ship moving around at speed within a few km of an arty ship is likely to exceed the tracking of arty turrets.

You don't actually need another person to test it. You can just anchor a secure can and move around it at various distances, directions, and velocities while firing. You may also want to change your overview to show the radial velocity column, which is shown in the same unit of measure as tracking speed, radians/sec.

You would think that simply orbiting would not result in a significant radial velocity as you orbit. But it does!

To clear up radial vs transversal vs angular velocities. From http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Overview_Scanner#Columns:


• Radial Velocity: A measure of your radial velocity, which is the speed at which you are approaching or moving away from target. When you have perfect orbit, your radial velocity is 0. Radial velocity takes transversal velocity and factors in distance. For example, if a target is at the transversal at 10km and at 100km, the target at 100km will have a much lower radial velocity and will be easier to hit. This is useful if you want to see how steady your orbit is or together with your transversal velocity, you can control your approach to target while keeping transversal up to reduce your opponents chance of tracking your ship.

• Transversal Velocity: The velocity that an object has relative to their horizontal and vertical movement to you. In other words, it is how fast they are moving up, down, left, or right not towards you. Basically transversal is really only important for gunnery pilots. A gun’s hit or miss rate is determined by three numbers: the distance from the object, the transversal velocity of the object, and the signature radius of the object. One of the biggest limiting factors of a ship’s targeting is its transversal velocity. At an extremely high transversal velocity, a gunnery turret will not be able to hit a target depending on the pilot’s tracking skills, the turret weapon, and the fitting.

• Angular Velocity: This is your transversal velocity divided by distance between you and your target. So if you have fast transversal but you are far from your target, you'll have no problem tracking. In theory, if the tracking of your weapon is higher than the angular velocity of the object, you should hit it almost all the time. However this is not a proven theory.



TLDR: Use Angular Velocity on your Overview. Try to keep your angular velocity at or below the tracking of your guns.

For overview (in PvP) you need :

Velocity, Radial Velocity and Angular Velocity. The first two are in metres/second and the third is in radians/second.

Don't worry if you don't know what a radian is, you don't need to. Load ammo into gun and do a show info in space and it'll tell you the tracking in rads/sec. That's all you need to know.

So now you can see how fast the target is going, whether they are approaching you or not and also whether your guns have a good chance to hit.

Edit - you generally only need to make the Velocity column 4 digits wide, same with radial and angular can be 3 digits wide.

Edit2 - transversal velocity is utterly useless if you have the three columns above selected. Its pretty useless under any circumstances frankly unless you can do trigonometry on the fly in your head.