EVE New Citizens Q&A

Please clarify, and forgive my example, but it's the easiest way for me to think about this: I'm orbiting you on my horse. You are all about tracking speed as you spin in place to try to shoot me. I'm circling you with my pistol in my left arm, it never changes in relative position to my body. Why is tracking speed even an issue when I'm orbiting a stationary object?

Edit: a perfectly smooth horse, orbiting in a perfect circle. I'm not asking about other issues right now. I'm assuming that the computer tries to turn a perfect circle when orbiting a stationary object.

It's an issue because as you orbit the stationary target your turrets must themselves adjust for tracking based on the angular velocity your orbit is creating. If your turrets cannot track fast enough you'll miss.

Stationary to stationary you'll hit 100% of the time (range accounted for). The moment there is any relative velocity the turrets have to track.

In your horse/pistol example you'd still have to adjust your aim to hit the target to account for your motion. If you kept your left arm perfectly still, never changing position relative to your body, you'll miss. You'd find you're using muscle to adjust your aiming arm to bring it "forward" in compensation of your motion. Also, your horse is slow... so tracking is "easier". Think of this same concept in an example of modern tanks. They use essentially tracking computers to adjust the aim of the main gun on a fixed point at range while the tank is in motion. In the days of manual tracking a tank in motion almost never hit it's intended target. And they still have to adjust for motion of the target (which the gunner uses the reticle - and these systems can be pretty complex).

For a detailed explanation and guide you can check out Eve Uni's Gunnery Guide.

Ok, so it looks like from the Gunnery Guide that if you orbit faster than your tracking speed, you will not be able to hit the target? I don't like it, but will work with what is given to me, lol.

There is a tracking guide out there that is flash based. If you do a google search for an eve tracking tutorial you should find it. It does not cover everything but it's a pretty good intro. IDK if you have ever tried shooting something in real life but it is difficult enough shooting at a stationary target much less something moving. Movies don't give an accurate depiction of how shooting from a horse actually turns out. Even cops who are professional shooters and spend lots of time at the range average over 90% miss rate in actual gun fights.

So to get out of the movie filled fantasy world that you have this picture in your head of and to move into the spaceship filled fantasy world that we are playing in I'll cover some bullet points. (pun intended):

Angular velocity can be displayed on your overview. That is the rate of change of angle between you and your target. If you were orbiting them perfectly circular and they were not moving at all your angular velocity would be zero and you would hit every time.

Tracking is very important in this game if you want to do damage with turrets. If you want to use turrets you'll want to skill up motion prediction and get used to using tracking mods.

Check out the gunnery tutorial- http://www.hostile.dk/files/eve/eve-tracking101.swf

My first toon in this game was Minmatar. I started fly Minmatar ships and hated them and hated guns so I cross trained Caldari and loved it. Missiles were so much easier. Then I created an alt account and when I ran out of stuff for her to train I started training gunnery and then spaceship command. Long story short once I tried out guns with some skill points in gunnery and having studied gunnery a little bit I fell in love with guns. However I don't think there is a turret based ship that I have that does not have tracking mods on it, at least not one that I fly in combat.

Something worth noting is that I've done done any of the in game tutorials as none of them existed when I started playing so I'm not sure what they've have or have not taught you thus far.

TL;DR version is guns might be a bit much for noobs with so much stuff coming at them at once. Either go missiles or drones for now or spend some time reading up on gunnery and tracking.

This is not correct.

Here is a DPS Graph from EFT of a blaster AB Atron shooting an Enyo. The Atron is moving full speed transverse to the Enyo (orbiting) and shooting antimatter. The Enyo is not moving.

You can see that up close the DPS on the Enyo is terrible because the Atron is missing it completely. As the Atron is moved further out in orbit the DPS gets better as it becomes able to track the stationary Enyo. Unfortunately the base DPS is also dropping so the DPS maxes out around 3.5 km. With that fit and my skills I had a falloff of 0.9 + 3.6 km so I'm already doing nearly half my damage before even considering tracking! You can see that tracking can be a huge problem even for short range weapon systems with good tracking.

These are just fits I had lying around but they illustrate the issue.

It is correct. I said perfectly circular. Other's have already posted in this thread how that does not happen but I was trying to avoid going off on an agility discussion and keep this on topic.

The fact remains that in the theoretical situation that I put forth is correct. It just would never happen for various reasons and I was sticking to the gunnery and tracking reasons. The OP will need to get into ship agility and piloting skills soon enough but I figured step one is learning how guns work. Step two would be learning how to pilot your ship to make the most use of your knowledge of how guns work.

Its not.

The Tracking formula only has one variable for Angular velocity. This variable is the same for both ships, the one that shoots an the one that get's it, no matter if one or both are moving, sitting, flying perfect circels or performing duckshaped loopings. The formular does not include relative alingment of the ships to each other, so it realy doesnt matter.

Confirming that perfectly orbiting a stationary target will not guarantee "perfect hits."

The tracking formula takes both ships' trajectory angles and speed into account.


Here are some general rules of thumb for tracking and damage application:

- flying parallel or at a straight on/away trajectory from a target will increase the odds of hitting something
- flying at a perpendicular trajectory from a target will lower the odds of hitting something
- flying farther away from a target will increase the odds of hitting something (because the speed at which your trajectory angle changes relative to the target is slower)
- flying closer to a target will lower the odds of hitting something (because you are moving very fast relative to your target)
- speed modifies all of the above (for better and worse... meaning you have to make judgement calls)
- the size of a target modifies the ability for a weapon to track and apply damage (because a ship's "sensor footprint" is taken into account)... smaller weapons will have greater "tracking"/application against larger targets... larger weapons will have less "tracking"/application against smaller targets.
- all of the above works both ways.

well then I sincerely apologize if I created any confusion especially on the new player section. I was under the impression that angular velocity was a measurement of the change in angle of the target relative to the gun as would make sense when calculating tracking of said gun. It makes far less sense for measurement to be ship to ship when imho it should be gun to target but as the OP pointed out it is what it is regardless of what I or we think it should be.

Admittedly it's been years since I've studied gunnery and may have even understood this better at one point but it just goes to show that you can play this game for years and not understand things fully even things you think that you have a decent understanding of. When I was a couple of months into this game there were rare times when I was able to teach a many years veteran things about the game so years of play do not mean absolute knowledge.

How ever I stick by what I said that gunnery and tracking are one of the most important things to understand in this game and also probably one of the most difficult. Even if you only fly missile boats understanding gunnery and tracking will help you avoid damage or minimize incoming damage.

Hopefully my confusion on the topic lead to a more specific discussion that will help someone other than myself. I can only say I was giving information as I understood it at the time and meant to mislead no one.

Interesting thread. Just why I am taking away image of horses orbiting in space I don't know...