In the past I have talked extensively about my experiences flying gunships, especially the Rifter, Enyo, and Ishkur. Lately I’ve been trying something a bit different and having a play in rocket ships, especially the Hawk and Vengeance. So what are the differences? Well, the most obvious one is that rockets don’t take tracking into account. Instead they rely on the speed and signature radius of their target to calculate how much damage they do, like all other missiles in Eve. Also, despite their recent buff, they do lower base damage than turret-based weapons systems. In this post I’m going to look a little at rockets and in later posts I’ll talk about the fits I’ve been flying and my experiences in them.

If we look at a Vengeanace fitted with Rocket Launcher IIs loaded with Caldari Navy missiles and operated by a pilot with all skills at level V then each rocket does 48.125 HP base damage, corresponding to 21.8 DPS. The explosion radius of a rocket is 20 m and the explosion velocity 127.5 m/s. This means that the rockets will do maximum damage against a ship with a signature radius greater than 20 m and travelling slower than 127.5 m/s. At higher speeds the rocket damage will be reduced. The formula for calculating missile damage is:

From this equation we can see that there are a couple of factors that we need to consider. The first thing to take into account is if our target is moving. If it isn’t then we can ignore the half of the equation with a velocity component and just look at the ratio between the ship’s signature radius and the missile’s explosion radius to determine how much damage is done.

If the target is moving then things become a bit more complicated and we have to evaluate a larger expression including the target’s velocity, the missile’s explosion velocity, and the damage reduction factor as well as the radius variables.

Let’s see what this means for an example Vengeance fit:

[Vengeance, Standard]

Small Bay Loading Accelerator I
Small Warhead Calefaction Catalyst I

What happens if we try and shoot a hypothetical ship with a 40 m signature radius?

The interesting thing about this graph is that it seems best to use Rage rockets in almost all situations. Unfortunately this decision comes with the drawback of a signature radius bloom pushing the Vengeance from 37 m to 49 m.

My biggest concern when flying a rocket ship, though, is that it just doesn’t have the DPS to melt targets like some of my favourite ships do. In solo frigate combat there is a general rule of thumb that you want in excess of 200 DPS in order to kill a target fast enough to do it before his friends arrive. So what happens if we compare the Vengeance posted above to another assault frigate, the Jaguar?

[Jaguar, Standard]

Small Projectile Burst Aerator I
Small Projectile Collision Accelerator I

This Jaguar fit does 206 DPS with close range faction projectile ammunition loaded and 164 DPS with Barrage.

Unfortunately these plots show us that in most realistic situations the Vengeance (and other rocket ships) are not able to lay down enough DPS to take out targets quickly. This is a shame, because in a straight up fight the Vengeance is an excellent ship but it just doesn’t have the punch that I am looking for in a solo roamer.

Today’s post is a guest piece from Xola Zuni. He’s been researching the mechanics of overheating and asked me if I’d share his results with you. So, here they are.

Greetings Space Warriors, Xola Zuni speaking. First of all, many thanks to Wensley to give me the opportunity to publish this article on his blog!

I did some research on Overheating, especially on how you can prolong it’s duration. The
short and simple result: You can overload your modules longer at no costs if your ship is properly fitted!

This article will explain how you can do it and how the result should look like.
A Minmatar assault frigate, the Wolf, was mainly used for these studies. 4 different high slot
fittings were use, each of those setups were tested 6 times, equaling in 24 runs total. The
200 mm ACs were overloaded and then activated untill they burnt out. As soon as the guns
went offline the rounds fired per each gun were counted and then compared with the other
results:

Shown in the graph below is the average of rounds shot per gun after 6 runs with each
setup.

The green and the yellow setups do a lot better than the other two. The best fit (yellow;
33,5 rounds avg) allows to get a bit more than 4 more shots out compared to the worst
(blue; 29,33 rounds avg) before the ACs die. That’s an improvement of almost 15
percentage.

The best fit has a offlined salvager in the fifth slot and in 5 out of 6 runs produced the
same result (33 rounds shot per gun). It also produced the best single result with 36
rounds fired.

The results of the two fits with an empty fifth slot (green & red) fluctuated a lot more than
those with a fitted fifth slot.

Although the big difference is not made by the fact that the fifth slot is fitted or not, it depends
upon how the ACs are arranged. The fits where the ACs are separated by the fifth slot
are both superior to the conventional “all guns to one side”-fittings.

Explain these fittings again…

The Wolf has 5 high slots and you can fit them differently. Mostly it is fitted:

AC; AC; AC; AC; (somethingelse or empty)

Thats the red/blue fitting in the graph: 4xAC+Salvager and 4xAC/empty

To get the improved results, the Wolf has been fitted:

AC;AC;(empty/smt else) AC; AC

Represented in the graph as 2AC+Salvager+2AC (yellow) and 2AC+empty+2AC (green).

Important sidenote: You can still group all 4 ACs together, grouping does not have impact
on the results.

Wish or Witchcraft? How does that work?

As I did not make the game nor did I check what the code looks like, I only can assume
how it works. But this assumption should be sound.
The first thing to know is that not only the overheated module takes damage, it also spreads
heat emissions onto the neighbouring modules. The closer they are, the more damage will
be applied. The next module in line gets the most emissions, the second in line the second most etc.

Now let´s have a close look how the heat is spread on a 4AC+ and on a 2AC+2AC Wolf

On the 4AC+ setup the heat sink slot only has to deal with one major heat source. This is
good for the heat sink slot but not so good for your guns, they will burn out faster as they do
have to buffer more heat emissions. Compared to the 2AC+2AC fit, the heat sink slot has
to buffer two major heat emissions. It will burn out faster, but the guns won´t. The same
rule applies also to the second, third and fourth in line heat emission.

So on the 2AC+2AC Wolf, the heat emissions are spread more equally on your guns and
the heat sink slot can function as a proper heat buffer.

Conclusion:

The further away the overloaded modules are, the longer they will last.

Footnotes:

This rule does/should also apply on your mid and low slots and also on other shiptypes. I
did some tests on a Hurricane (highs and mids) and the first results were promising and
confirming the results I have got with my Wolf. Unfortunately, the repair costs stopped that
project from being finalised.

If you have some spare ISKies laying around, send me some and note as reason “Xola
should last longer”. I will just buy one space tonic out of your isk. The rest will be spent on
my research projects. Promise!

Here are my skills regarding RoF and thermodynamics as they havea major impact on the results I have received:

• Gunnery 5
• Rapid Firing 4
• Thermodynamics 4

The wolf was fitted with 4 x 200 mm ACs and 1 x Gyrostabilizer.

So, thats it, thanks for your attention and kudos to Wensley to let me share my research
results on his blog!

Xola Zuni

Thanks Xola for taking the time to do this. I had been meaning to write about overheating for a little while. There is a thread on Failheap Challenge (the phoenix that rose from the ashes of the now defunct Scrapheap Challenge) that discusses this exact topic. The use of heat sink modules has been well known for a long while but it was always assumed that heat wrapped around the rack. Xola’s experiments and the ones detailed on FHC both show that this is not the case and you should arrange your modules accordingly.

In a previous post I have discussed how chosing the right projectile ammunition is important. In this article I’m going to look at the issues of range and tracking and their effects on hit quality.

Lets start off by discussing the simplest part of this equation, the range. Your guns have two attributes that affect their range: optimal range and falloff. If a target is inside your optimal range you will always be able to hit it for full damage (tracking aside). Outside of your optimal there is a decreasing hit chance with the probability of hitting reaching 50 % at optimal + falloff and diminishing to practically 0 % at optimal + 2 x falloff. The formula for this is:

0.5 ^ ((max(0, Range To Target - Turret Optimal Range))/Turret Falloff)^2)

The plot above is for a gun with a theoretical optimal of 1 km and a falloff of 1 km. You can see that the damage drops off rapidly as the range reaches the edge of the first falloff region but the initial decrease is pretty gradual. If we plug in some numbers we can see that at 1/4 falloff you do 95 % of your theoretical maximum. At 1/3 falloff you still do 93 % and at 1/2 falloff you are still doing 85% but by 2/3 falloff this has decreased to just 73 %.

Most Amarr and Gallente pilots don’t really worry about their falloff. Amarr pilots just switch crystals to keep their targets within their optimal range while the Gallente usually hit approach and aim to get right on top of their target. The Minmatar, though, make great use of their falloff to get the most out of their speed and maneuverabilty. Let’s use a Hurricane as a standard ship and take a look at the damage it does at various ranges.

[Hurricane, Shield]

Warrior II x5
Warrior II x1

The graph above shows the relative ranges of RF EMP/Fusion/Plasma, Barrage, and Hail. On the face of it Hail makes for an excellent close range ammunition with EMP/Fusion/Plasma providing a good mid-range choice and Barrage being the long range muniton of choice. For a kiting ship like this Hurricane a key range is 13 km, that of an overheated web. Up to about 16 km we can see that the high damage faction ammunitions out-damage Barrage. Beyond this range Barrage becomes our best choice until we consider the resists of what we are shooting. Versus T1 armour tankers Barrage is probably still the best choice at these ranges but what about the most ubiquotous of battlecruisers, the Drake?

[Drake, Fleet]

Warrior II x5

Effective HP: 102,161
Tank Ability: 210.31 DPS
Damage Profile - (EM: 25.00%, Ex: 25.00%, Ki: 25.00%, Th: 25.00%)
Shield Resists - EM: 66.04%, Ex: 83.02%, Ki: 79.62%, Th: 72.83%
Armor Resists - EM: 57.50%, Ex: 23.50%, Ki: 36.25%, Th: 53.25%

For this fairly standard Drake we can easily see that EMP rapidly becomes by far the best ammunition choice right out to 21 km. In fact, with the exception of when we move to the very edge of tackle range, the faction ammunitions almost always do better damage than Barrage.

So far I have pretty much dismissed Hail (and by extension the other close range ammunitons) out of hand. Now we’ll look at why. The second part of the hit chance equation considers the tracking of our guns.

0.5 ^ (((Transversal speed/(Range to target * Turret Tracking))*(Turret Signature Resolution / Target Signature Radius))^2)

Republic Fleet EMP	Barrage	Hail

The three graphs above show the how range and transversal affect the ability to hit for each of the major ammunition types I’ve already discussed.

As before, lets take a Drake as an example target and look at what happens when we shoot it with EMP (because we have already learnt that this is better than shooting it with Barrage, even if we kite it). The Drake is a good target example for this because against a missile ship you want to be doing your maximum possible velocity while doing as much damage as you can to punch through its passive tank. You also, most likely, want to avoid getting into scrambler range so that you can disengage with relative ease. The Drake I have used in the example above has a maximum velocity of 1,038 m/s compared to our 1,434 m/s. Depending on how the Drake flies, our transversal will most likely be somewhere in the 500 m/s to 1000 m/s region so we can zoom in on that section of the graph. If we are confident that the Drake isn’t fit for close range tackle or just decide that we want to get in and do as much DPS as possible then it is likely that we will drop into a close orbit without our microwarp drive and we can look at this as well and see where our sweet spot lies.

The graph we generate in these situations show us that despite what you might think, you do not want to get right in close against the Drake. In fact, we get better hits between about 7,500 m and 10,000 m at most practical speeds. Of course. No situation is this simple and we have to take the Drake pilot’s actions into account. Maybe he fires up his MWD and tries to burn for freedom. Maybe he goes into a counter orbit and tries to maximise the orbital velocity so you find it harder to hit him. There are lots of other situations that we can look at to decide what, exactly, is the best thing to do but I hope that the message you take away from this is that it is not always the best thing to get in as close as possible and that pulling back into the falloff region can actually help increase the damage that you are able to apply.

The plot above shows what happens if we load Hail instead. What we can see here is that while we do have a reasonable amount of range, even a very small amount of transversal speed seriously reduces our damage output. If you can be sure that your target is going to be stationary then Hail is possibly a good choice against armour-tanking ships. In almost all cases this isn’t true and the movement of your opponent will mean that you are not landing the best quality hits. A ship that would use Hail well is a dual web Hurricane.

Another good example of this is to imagine a Rifter fight and look what happens when the two frigates are orbiting each other with either Barrage (left) or Fusion (right) loaded. If both ships opt to orbit at the same range then the transversal velocity will be about 1 km/s and then will drop depending on how they are actually manuveuring. This, in fact, is a good demonstration of why using “keep at range” to minimise your transversal is often the best approach if you can’t be sure of getting under your opponents guns. While the sweet spot for Fusion does more damage, Barrage allows you to more consistently apply damage at range and speed. The Rifters I used in this example are my favourite afterburner fit with two ambit extension rigs to maximise flexibility.

Its worth a note here that I really don’t like the term transversal velocity. The key number in turret tracking is the angular velocity, measured in radians/second. The point is that the transversal velocity does not take into account the range. What might seem like a low transversal at 18 km becomes a very high angular velocity at 1 km. Transversal velocity has become a key part of the Eve lexicon, however, and I am going to continue to use the term here. If you need a visual aid as to what constitutes transversal and how to increase or decrease it check out this old CCP Flash site.

So far in all of this discussion I haven’t included wrecking shots. These occur whenever Eve’s dice roll 0.01 or lower. For every gunshot fired in the game, Eve rolls a die and generates a random number between 0 and 1. If the dice roll, X, is greater than the chance to hit, the shot misses. If the shot hits then the quality of hit is given by X + 0.5. Using this information we can calculate the actual DPS that our ship lays down using the following formulae:

AvgDPS = Base Damage * [ ( ChanceToHit^2 + ChanceToHit + 0.0499 ) / 2 ]

So, EFT warriors, take note. The EFT DPS is pretty much never actually applied and hit quality becomes the key thing you should think about. More often it is better to optmise tracking for better hits than it is to optimise for raw damage numbers. As you fly the ship and get used to it you can use your own experiences and the combat logs to decide exactly which fit works best for you. As an example I had a conversation with a corp mate who was telling me that a railgun Daredevil would do 98 DPS against an orbitting inteceptor with Spike loaded into 150 mm railgun IIs. I then proceeded to show him that the actual DPS that would be applied in this situation is somewhere between 1 and 8 DPS, not enough to scare the inty off.

If you want to run these calculations for yourself and see the numbers for your own circumstances then there is an excellent calculator at the Eve Geek web site.

As a closing note, this disussion has been almost completely about projectile ammunitions. The main reason for this is because I have wanted to demonstrate why the faction ammunitions are absolutely the best choice in almost all circumstances. When it comes to close range guns blasters and pulse lasers do not have the same degree of choice and are simply stuck with selecting range. You can use this same methodology to compare long- and short-range fits such as railgun frigates and to understand why fitting beam lasers is pretty much never the right answer.

In future posts I will build upon this discussion to look at the strengths and weaknesses of various fits and the tactics used to get the most out of them.

ECM drones are pretty much the bane of my life. So many battlecruiser brawls have been ruined for me because my opponent carried ECM drones and they got off a couple of jam cycles, putting me in deep trouble and costing me the fight. This wouldn’t bother me so much except for the fact that it is always light ECM drones that cause me these troubles. Why can a flight of frigate sized drones lock my Hurricane out of a fight so effectively?

Let’s take a look at the ECM drones available to us:

• Hornet EC-300 – Jam Strength 1.0
• Vespa EC-600 – Jam Strength 1.5
• Wasp EC-900 – Jam Strength 2.0

So what? Those jam strengths are pretty puny when compared to best named multispectral (2.4 jam strength) and racial (3.6) jammers. Why am I getting my knickers in a twist, then? Well, in short its all to do with the way that ECM stacks, or doesn’t as the case may be.

Take a random spaceship, let’s say a Rifter, and try and jam it with an EC-300 drone. The Rifter has a LADAR sensor strength of 8. Therefore the chance of a single ECM drone jamming it is 1/8 or 12.5%. That seems pretty reasonable, don’t you think? Well, let’s see what happens if we add a second drone to the mix. There is a 87.5% chance that the first drone didn’t jam our Rifter and an 87.5% chance of the second drone not getting a jam off as well if that happens so the chance of getting jammed is now 1 – (0.875 * 0.875) = 23.5 %. If we continue this maths for the next three drones the total chance of our Rifter getting jammed is 1 – (0.875 * 0.875 * 0.875 * 0.875 * 0.875) = 48.7%. That seems fairly reasonable to me. These are frigate-sized drones and the Rifter is a frigate so they should be effective against it. A flight of Warrior IIs would make short work of it after all.

The formula for calculating the chances of getting a jam from multiple drones is:

1 – (1 – jam strength/sensor strenghth)^n where n is the number of drones.

Let’s look at how our flight of ECM drones fairs against some other ships:

What this table shows us is that even versus a battlecruiser frigate sized drones still have more than a 25 % chance of getting a jam. The thing that really stands out to me, though, is that versus a frigate EC-300s have a 49 % jam chance but EC-900s only have a 39 % chance against a battleship. Surely battleship drones should have the same relative effect on their equivalent class as frigate ones do.

The big problem for me is that no other type of electronic warfare drone is this effective. There is no point in flying with tracking disruption drones or sensor dampening drones or, heaven forbid, target painting drones. There should be no question that these things are imbalanced and need to be brought into line.

Either way, it means that a flight of EC-300s can seriously affect the outcome of a fight, even against much larger ships. One of my favourite fights is a good old battlecruiser brawl but in Great Wildlands pretty much everyone I fight has ECM drones and I pretty much always lose these fights if I get into scrambler range. Obviously if I stayed out of scrambler range and put my own drones on their EC-300s it would even things out a bit but I won’t lie, I am terrible at multitasking. So what options do I have other than just to get better?

Well, obviously one option is to carry my own ECM drones. Usually I prefer damage drones because I think they get me out of more hairy situations, more often than not with a killmail. My biggest concern is getting scrambled by a frigate under my guns and because of their excellent tracking most frigate pilots can easily shake off a flight of EC-300s. Warriors, however, usually get the job done. Especially when they are already under pressure from a neutraliser.

Instead of, or at least as well as, getting better at Eve I am looking at another idea. I usually fly with a nanofiber in one of my low slots. This gives my Hurricane very nice speed and agility but it is a property of the ship I have not really found myself having to rely on so much. Instead I am considering fitting a LADAR Backup Array II. This means that I lose some speed (1,470 m/s to 1,344 m/s) and some agility (6.93 s to 8.23 s align time) but I gain sensor strength (16 to 24). This means the chance of EC-300s jamming me goes from one in four to one in five. It might not be much of a gain but in battlecruiser and ECM heavy space like Great Wildlands I rarely need my maximum speed but every bit of ECM resistance helps.

Of course, like all experiments this might end in failure but I think its worth a shot. Sure, its not much of a difference but until ECM drones get the re-balance they deserve I’m going to try every little thing I can to increase my chances in these fights. Oh, and while in Great Wildlands I will now be carrying my own ECM drones just in case.

Edit: Jackal sets were mentioned to me on Twitter. A low-grade set would cost me about 100 million ISK or so and boost my sensor strength to 23 on a regular Hurricane and 34 on the ECCM Hurricane. Interesting. Very interesting.

Edit the second: No post on this blog would be complete without a graph these days so here’s how jam chance varies with sensor strength for a flight of EC-300s:

Dominion is nearly upon us and one of the changes that didn’t make it into this expansion was the proposed change to assault frigates. CCP proposed a 15% per level boost to afterburner speed per level of the racial frigate resulting in a 75% speed increase across the board. This was eventually canned because they weren’t happy about it in testing.

A lot of people were very excited about the changes and with good reason. This boost would have made assault frigates into fantastically fast damage dealers without the ability to disable their speed with warp scramblers. As you can probably tell by my tone here, I was less excited by the changes. assault frigates are already tough little damage dealers and, while they need looking at, a massive speed boost would make them far too overpowered. They’re there to bring on the pain, not to tackle. I like the fact that there is a now a decision to be made between afterburner and microwarp drive and I don’t like the idea of forcing the ship to fit one rather than the other.

Another argument that I have against this is the boost to faction and pirate frigates. These are designed to be fast little ships with damage somewhere between T1 frigates and assault frigates and tackling abilities somewhere between T1 frigates and interceptors.

So do I think that assault frigates are fine as they are? Well, no. If nothing else they do need to get their fourth bonus. Plus I know plenty of Retribution pilots who would kill for a second midslot and, while I can see why they don’t have one, I understand why. Add to that the fact that rockets are simply terrible and you have a ship class that needs some investigation. The solution, I think, is too look at every single ship and give it a suitable bonus rather than make a sweeping generalisation across the whole class.

Let’s take a look at the Jaguar and Wolf because they are the ones that I am most familiar with.

Name: Jaguar
Hull: Rifter Class
Role: Assault Ship

The Jaguar is a versatile ship capable of reaching speeds unmatched by any other assault-class vessel. While comparatively weak on the defensive front it sports great flexibility, allowing pilots considerable latitude in configuring their loadouts for whatever circumstances they find themselves in.

Developer: Thukker Mix

Being the brain-child of the nomadic Thukkers, it is no surprise the Jaguar is as fast as it is. Initially conceived as a way for the tribe to pack some added punch to their organized detachments, they’ve found it to be equally useful as messenger, scout and escort, and it is likely to become one of the most commonly-seen ships in the Thukkers’ stomping grounds.

Minmatar Frigate Skill Bonus: 5% Small Projectile damage bonus

Assault Ships Skill Bonus: 10% Small Projectile Turret optimal range and 5% projectile damage per level.

So taking a look at the Jaguar first we can see that it is designed to be an extension of the Rifter’s flexibility. With 4 high slots, 4 mid slots, and 3 low slots and Minmatar T2 shield resistances it makes an excellent shield tanker. You can fit anything from a single shield extender with a full complement of tackle/e-war, through dual shield extender buffer fits, to active tanks. It screams out to be fitted with autocannons and flown in almost exactly the same way as the Rifter. So why does it have a bonus to small projectile turret optimal range? On a ship like this a bonus to fall-of would be far more appropriate.

The important question is what fourth bonus would I give it? It is not designed to be a hard hitter so I think another damage bonus would be out of place. Following the Rifter model I can see three bonuses which would fit:

1. 7.5% bonus to tracking per level: This is lifted straight out of the Rifter’s bonuses and would follow the theme of making the Jaguar into the next logical step from the Rifter. It would allow fits that don’t have stasis webifiers to still lay down good damage and also go some way to counteracting the Amarrian electronic warfare that is likely to be applied to it.
2. 5% bonus to base speed per level: While I said I was opposed to an across the board increase to speed I think the Jaguar is a ship where such a bonus might possibly be merited. I know that it is already the fastest assault frigate but as a ship designed for the hit and run attacks by the Thukker Tribe the ability to engage and disengage at will is vital to its function. The main argument against this is that assault frigate speeds are already balance and this would probably unbalance things in favour of the Jaguar.
3. 5% reduction in signature radius: This is another potential bonus based upon the ships Thukker roots. It has far less potential to be overpowered than a speed increase but again the Jaguar already has a significantly smaller signature radius than other assault frigates.

I think that while writing that I talked myself out of a bonus to speed or signature radius. In my mind that leaves a tracking bonus as the only viable option for a boost to the Jaguar.

Name: Wolf
Hull: Rifter Class
Role: Assault Ship

Named after a mythical beast renowned for its voraciousness, the Wolf is one of the most potentially destructive frigates currently in existence. While hardier than its brother the Jaguar it has less in the way of shield systems, and the capabilities of its onboard computer leave something to be desired. Nevertheless, the mere sight of a locked and loaded Wolf should be enough to make most pilots turn tail and flee.

Developer: Boundless Creation

Boundless Creation’s ships are based on the Brutor tribe’s philosophy of warfare: simply fit as much firepower onto your ship as possible. Defense systems and electronics arrays therefore take a back seat to sheer annihilative potential.

Minmatar Frigate Skill Bonus: 5% Small Projectile Damage bonus

Assault Ships Skill Bonus: 5% Small Projectile Turret damage and 10% falloff per level

Unlike the Jaguar the Wolf is designed to focus on one particular aspect of the Rifter’s abilities: its damage. With the Brutor’s philosophy this ship is all about firepower. Its five high slots, two mid slots, and four low slots show that this ship is not designed for skirmishing but instead to deliver as much pain as possible. Its double damage bonuses mean that it can function equally well as either an artillery or autocannon platform. Because of this I would propose that it swaps its falloff bonus for the Jaguar’s optimal range bonus.

For the Wolf the fourth and final bonus needs to be something related to damage. I can see two possibilities:

1. 7.5% bonus to tracking per level: Like in the case of the Jagaur I think this bonus could be applied to the Wolf without causing too much controversy. That fact that it cannot fit a propulsion module, web, and warp disruptor together means that it is likely to have tracking issues so would feel the benefits of this more than the Jaguar. This bonus would also benefit artillery configurations.
2. 5% rate of fire bonus: Sticking with the theme of increased damage this would be a boost to both artillery and autocannon setups.

So of all of my proposals above, which would I go for? Well, without hesitation I would give the Jaguar a bonus to fall-off and tracking while losing the bonus to optimal range. For the Wolf I think a tracking bonus is in order as well. I think that to encourage a bit of variety with artillery setups the optimal bonus would be more suitable than the falloff one that it currently has but then as someone who fliers autocannon Wolves I would be happy if they kept the falloff bonus as is.

So that’s my thoughts on the Jaguar and Wolf. What assault frigates would you change and why?

Elfhat0r, a former Tusker, has written an E-war guide and this has got me thinking about electronic warfare and its place in our fleets.

Electronic warfare is a very powerful tool in Eve. All too often it boils down to Falcon alts and flavour of the month fits with tracking disruptors. The tracking disruptor fits are fun but when every solo ship of any worth is accompanied by a Falcon things quickly get dull. A well designed e-war presence can really swing the impetus of a fight in your favour. Force multiplication is the name of the game. How can a bunch of frigates or cruisers overwhelm a force with greater firepower?

Generally when I run around in a gang of more than three or four ships I like to start thinking how e-war can support the gang. A lot of times these days we knowingly engage bait or opposition who we know can bring support. In these situations it is important to maximise your survivability. There are generally two ways that I approach brining e-war in a gang. The first is probably the most traditional, dedicated e-war ships. The second is probably my preferred approach but also slightly harder to organise and manage, that is e-war distributed evenly through the fleet without specialist ships.

Every race in Eve has its own distinctive flavour of electronic warfare. Generally this is designed to either enhance its own strengths or play against its traditional enemy’s weaknesses. For example the Amarr use tracking disruptors to try and counter the Minmatars’ strengths of speed and flexible range. The Minmatar for their part use target painters to try and maximise the amount of damage that their guns do against the tanky and immobile Amarr. Caldari ships use ECM to jam their Gallente counterparts. When jammed the Gallente are unable bring their high damage blasters to bear. Likewise the Gallente take advantage of the fact that ECM is best applied from long range to use sensor dampners to bring the ECM ships into range. The increase lock time also makes it harder to remove their drones from the equation.

The advantage of bringing dedicated e-war ships to a fight is that each race’s ship has a bonus to its flavour of e-war. Even better the T2 ships have a bonus to a second variant, except the Caldari who have a capacitor bonus to their ECM. (Amarr: neut range, Minmatar: web range, Gallente: scram range.) This makes the ships very powerful in their roles. Force Recons also have the advantage of fitting a covert ops cloak so that they can move around in safety and only be deployed when needed. The disadvantage of these specialist ships is that they make obvious targets to be removed from the battlefield, bring limited DPS, and are generally pretty fragile.

The typical fleets that I command tend to be either frigate wolfpacks or T1 cruiser gangs. In these gangs I prefer the distributed e-war approach. Rather than having a bunch of redundant scrams and webs it is better to spread the e-war out through the fleet. This means that we can bring maximum damage to bear on our targets and also makes it more difficult for the opponent to remove the e-war. The downside is that we no longer benefit from the role-specific bonuses of the dedicated e-war platforms. It also takes a bit longer to organise the gang to make sure that a suitable balance is obtained and means that members should be versed in all forms of e-war.

Both approaches are very effective at what they do. Personally I prefer the e-war specialist approach in informal gangs. Its easier for someone to bring a Griffin or Blackbird along than it is to try and split e-war between a handful of ships. In larger fleets, though, I prefer the distributed approach. At the end of the day its horses for courses and everyone will have their favoured method. I just thought I’d share some thoughts.

I’m a big fan of understanding the theory behind our universe. Maybe its because I’m a physicist by trade. Who knows?

Anyway, the Goons have outdone themselves in this field. GARPA – I assume this stands for Goon Advanced Research Project Agency – have produced a manual for manipulating the in-game grid. In simple combat situations the grid is never really considered. It is simply the area of space in which a set of objects will be rendered by the game engine and appear in your overview. When you are talking about large fleets, however, the grid becomes more important.

Loading large numbers of ships creates lag. This slows down the response time of a fleet as it lands on grid and allows opponents to seize the upper hand while the landing force is orientating itself for the fight. By manipulating the grid it is possible to create a large grid where the force can warp in out of range, load grid, and then move into combat positions fully prepared. A sneaky commander could manipulate the grids so that he could hide a large portion of his fleet when conducting a defence. Even at close range the established grid would seem to be invisible even though the reserve fleet is only a few kilometres from the fight.

This document is now in the public domain and can be accessed in PDF format here. You can also read the Eve Online forum thread.

Last night was one of those quiet ones where its really hard to find good targets. Or indeed targets at all. During a roam into Placid the only targets that I could find were two Harpies. The first one was in a belt and I decided to engage it and find out if it was fitted with blasters or rails. I went in and settled for a 5 km orbit to make sure that blasters wouldn’t hurt me too hard. That wasn’t wise. Unfortunately I hadn’t checked the Harpy’s bonuses and I pretty quickly bailed and ran away as the optimal-enhanced blasters tore through my shields and armour. The second Harpy seemed to be rail fit so didn’t hurt me at all. His friends, however, hurt pretty hard and I ended up dying to the support squad that showed up.

This got me thinking about assault frigates in general. Since the changes to speed in Quantum Rise they’ve become a very popular ship class. This means that not only do you see a lot of them around but also that their cost has shot up. Personally I think this makes it hard to justify flying them. For the price of a Jaguar hull alone I can fully equip a Rupture and end up with a much more flexible (and insurable) hull. The question in my mind, though, was can I take any of them on in my Rifter? Click here to read more.. »