EVE Technology Lab

(reserved for future use)

Good questions.

Pyfa assumes when you use a cap booster that you fire it off as rapidly as it can go. So if you're using a T2 heavy cap booster with 3200 charges, that would be +3200 of cap every 22 seconds (12 second cycle time, 10 second reload).

But what if you're only using 2000 GJ of cap every 22 seconds? That means when it fires off, you're "overfilling" your capacitor by 1200 GJ, effectively wasting about a third of the cap charge. So if you have 30 charges in your bay, at that rate you're effectively only using 20 of them.

Pyfa.fit uses a simulation engine called Gnosis that works as close to the same way as actual EVE mechanics work as I could get (<3 CCP Larrikan for his knowledge and help on that project). The really cool thing about it is we feed in a list of modules we want it to simulate, along with some criteria for them, and it actually runs a 10 minute simulation of what happens (all in a split second, of course, time is compressible :) ).

One of the factors we can feed in is "only use this module at X percent of cap." In the case of capacitor, most ships peak at around 25% capacitor (varies slightly based on fit), so we default to using cap boosters at that point.

This means we wait longer to use them, Pyfa will use the first charge right at 0s (the booster is ready to fire, after all), which wastes 100% of the charge. So we waste little to none of the charge, as few ships will be using boosters that will overfill their cap when they're at 25%.

We also get more benefit out of passive regen, depending on how long it takes you to hit 25% in the first place. But since passive regen peaks around 25%, we might as well get as much benefit out of it as possible.

TL:DR; while our cap stability goes down on paper, as a general rule you end up using less cap and burning through charges slower, as well as wasting less of each charge. Just ask yourself what % of cap you fire off the booster at as a player, and try using that number. (Most people don't use it when 100%, unless they're panicking.)

If you want to get the old behavior back (or at least something very similar), you can simply go into preferences and change the percentage from 25 to 99. Feel free to play around with the different numbers and see how it affects the cap stability.

But even more important than cap stability, look at the capacitor warfare graph. That gives a FAR better representation of what happens over time than a simple number does. And (at least for the moment) exclusive to Pyfa.fit. :)