Crime & Punishment

Capitalization, Punctuation, and a clearer antecedent would have improved readability, but that's not what Ghazu said.


Fixed for clarity. Larger leaps of assumption are in brackets.

I have a guess as to how the client decides how long your model is going to take to turn. I'm pretty sure the animation on your screen turns as fast as the slowest possible align time for your ship without mods, so that you don't end up pointed at your target, at 100% speed by the spedometer, and still not warping (at least in normal situations). I could be wrong, and I haven't run any good tests designed to falsify that guess*, but it fits what I've seen.

Examples of when this doesn't work include aligning somewhere when undocking (you end up pointed at your align target and sliding sideways).

*See the Wason Rule Discovery task for why that's important.

The most efficient ganks use high DPS ships like the Talos to kill the freighter over the full period of time before CONCORD arrives. The middle ground in efficiency use high Alpha ships like the Tornado and expect to get 2 volleys out of them.

If you take a high DPS ship or a jamming ship along with you, you can disrupt their gank starting as soon as they go GCC. At that point, shooting them incurs no penalty.

The only thing you can't stop are the most expensive ganks, which use high Alpha ships like the Tornado and only expect to get 1 volley out of them (and thus require twice the ships that the middle ground gank uses).

get every person in the group to message the freighter pilot and tell him not to be an idiot who carries 20+bn in his freighter

Who decided the gankers were recycled? Why don't people read threads before posting? Why can't people take advice? :arrgh:

Here is a breakdown for those that are interested.

Don't make yourself a target. How do you do this do you say? Well start by not carrying more than 1B worth of goods in your cargo hold. For the gankers to make a profit they have to take advantage of the ganking mechanics. They are different depending on how your goods are packaged as well. If they are single wrapped, double wrapped (which means they are taking a chance on something they cannot see), or just loose items in your hold. The main take away is do not carry more than 1B isk in your freighter and it makes you not worth the effort. If 50% of what you carry drops that is ~500m drop. They want the chance at the goods, not just the KM. With a 500m drop you might replace 4 tornados of the 9-12+ it takes to kill a decently skilled freighter pilot in a .5 system.

Basically do the math (since EVE is all math and spreadsheets anyways) like this if you want to figure out the break even point for gankers. The below information, courtesy of Red Frog Freight's old Pilot Manual, is based on older data when you were still paid insurance when ganking. Now since there is no insurance payout for gankers, their break-even and profit points are even higher which means they look for really juicy targets otherwise they lose money on each gank.

If we assume a 13 second response time from Concord (in 0.5), a battleship with a DPS of 1,200, and an initial cost of a battleship to be 90M, we have the following approximate break-even points in relation to effective hit points (where cost = gain for the gankers):
4,444 ISK x your effective hit points
where the break-even point is the theoretical value where the insurance payout, cost of insurance and cost of the ganker’s ships and modules equals the value of the collateral value.
So, if you have a freighter with 134,472 effective hp, it roughly translates to a break-even point of 600M ISK.
The maximum amount of hit points you can have on a freighter, vary a bit between the different freighters, but assuming level V skills and no implants, the number of battleships required to take down a freighter, and payouts per ganker are as follows:

Freighter, Hit Points, Battleships, Break-even Cargo Value, 50M per ganker cargo value , 100m per ganker cargo value
Providence , 198,997, ~14 , 884M , 2.27B, 3.65B
Fenrir , 178,995, ~12 , 795M , 2.04B, 3.28B
Obelisk , 205,910 ~14 , 915M, 2.35B, 3.78B
Charon, 184,993 ~13, 822M , 2.11B, 3.40B

The various profit-points are listed below. Use those when considering whether the risk is worth it.
0M profit (=break-even): cargo value equal to 4444 ISK x effective hit points
50M profit pr gank pilot: cargo value equal to 11388 ISK x effective hit points
100M profit pr gank pilot: cargo value equal to 18333 ISK x effective hit points
It is unknown what kind of profit gank gangs want, but we would assume that they look for worthy targets, containing cargo worth 3-4B ISK, to make the whole project worthwhile. Finding the right target is time consuming, so settling for less than 50M per person, seems unlikely. Very unlikely when you figure that they might spend hours waiting for the right freighter to kill when they could sit and make 80M+ per hour flying a tengu ratting in nullsec. Then again it is not always about the isk and sometimes it is also about padding out their kill boards with nice kills from dumb pilots who fly with to much stuff in their holds.

Take away: If you are going to fly with lots of expensive stuff in your freighter double wrap it so it cant be scanned and make them take a chance. If you want to fly safe in general, keep your shipments 1B or less and don't double wrap them so they can see your cargo is not worth the effort. Do this and you should be good to go and never need to worry about it since you just aren't worth the effort and cost to them. In the end, If they want to gank you they will but make them pay for it. If you only carry 1B in cargo and you get ganked, they are actually paying to gank you since they aren't making enough to even replace their ships. Fly safe, Fly Smart, and make them work for it.

I mean seriously, pilots who fly around and get killed with ~22B worth of stuff in their hold, all unwrapped and for all to see...yeah that is just plain stupid piloting.

…not to mention that pretty much every assumed value and time used to calculate those numbers is wrong.

I lack sufficient information to tell but are the numbers off by ALOT? What's the "breakeven" point for the calculation? Is a freighter full of Mexallon a definite Gank target (worth ~4.5billion). The ramifications for price stability are interesting (to me at least ;)

Posted before. Stay under 2 bill and no wraps on your stuff and you will avoid most gank. It can still happen tho...

It's been a long time since I took vector based physics in college, but remember that just because your highest velocity is in one direction you still have a positive magnitude (speed) in any direction less than ninety degrees from the direction of motion. Since alignment requires only 75% of maximum velocity there's actually a significantly wide cone of vectors you're "aligned" to when traveling at max speed in any given direction. The same trick works with ships fitted with MWDs When you're ship cycles off it's MWD you're traveling at +100% velocity and decelerating, so you can picture your cone of alignment suddenly flaring out and then rapidly shrinking back to it's normal diameter. There's also the weird fact in EVE mechanics that ships at high velocities relative to their mass tend to make banking turns, where as ships a near zero velocity turn on the center of mass. Eg: why it's near impossible to catch pods with instalockers at high-sec gate camps.