EVE General Discussion

It is much easier to hit something traveling at near the same speed. If missiles went 100x as fast as a ship, they could never correct in time to follow any changes in the ship's speed or heading.

:insert techno babble to make sense of a particular game balance mechanic here:


Not quite.

Lets say a BS is at 100km, traveling 120ms.
If a missile is traveling 100x faster than a whole battleship for a fair slow mark. the missile is going 12km/s.
8.3 seconds to reach its target who can at best deviate 1 km at best.

Many current day anti-air missiles can already travel 1.2km/s and connect with a target 7km away at mach 2 or pulling a 88 m/s² accelerated turn. A shorter flight in scale to greater possible deviated target distance of 4km.

It wouldn't unbalance things really. In order to keep the same range on missiles do something like -50% max flight time, +50% velocity.

I habeeb it.

In all seriousness though, it would make missiles a little more competitive in larger-gang warfare if missiles got 50-100% velocity and a corresponding cut of equal magnitude to flight time.

As it stands, missiles can barely land a volley before a target is killed.

Funny that, yeah. Missiles can take pretty long to travel.

But it seems bullets travel instantly, so heh..

Current missiles do use some aerodynamic effects to steer with in addition to thrust vectoring. This lets them turn much faster than a real space missile (which wouldn't look like a proper missile anyway).

Space missiles have to provide all their turning force via thrusters on the sides/thrust vectoring.

That said, EvE's a submarine game, so Modern Torpedoes are really the better comparison.


But yeah, the relative speeds don't much matter, it's the relative acceleration capabilities (in submarine terms, turning radius + acceleration) that matter, and so long as the missile can accelerate faster, has a top speed (EvE has atmosphere) faster than the target, and endurance to let it catch a distant target, it'll hit.
The stories of the SR-71's patented evasive maneuver "Punch-It" are spectacular.

They're not slow at all, they're faster than modern torpedoes.

Scourge Furies travel at Mach 4.

Everyone saying missiles have a hard time missing in real life, please know that this is false.

Modern missiles have a hard time hitting anything that can change trajectory quickly. There are ways to maneuver to avoid most other tracking computers as well, even on slower aircraft, that will cause the missile to overshoot and pretty much lose the opportunity to hit it, as it's so fast that looping around consumes an immense amount of fuel.

They have a fantastically easy time hitting things that are at relatively close range, even if the target is highly maneuverable. If they are, however, a few kilometers away (as they often are in Eve), a maneuverable airframe can avoid an air-to-air missile fairly easily.

As for air-to-ground missiles, the most advanced models for high-altitude targets only really have enough fuel for one turn...and actually, most are designed to shoot past the target and come back down on it.

Low-altitude is another story, but again...that is due to shorter range.

Low-altitude ADW or short range a2a missiles are comparable to HAMs, more than the slower heavy missiles, etc.

TL;DR: missile things



The stories of them trying to put a weapon on it are pretty great too.

"Hey guys...he uh...crashed into his own missile" (or was it a bomb? I forgot)