Interesting link #10.5: Alphafleet 102

Continuing from Part 1.

Fly it like you won it

So, I won a Megathron Navy Issue.

Biggest. Handlebar. Moustache. Ever

Now to skill up to fly it, so I can smash people like my corpies do.

Interesting link #11: Nullsec Travel 101

Continuing the trend of posting Broski images:

Bolognese Mittani

1. Arrange to have garlic and onions cast into hot oil.
2. The carrot and celery you must divide against themselves. Ground beef, too, shall turn upon the burner; crush any coherent resistance with a spoon of wood. Sautee until no hint of blood remains to stain your hands.
3. Perhaps, in a dark place without witnesses, the tomato shall meet with the knife.
4. The basil and parsley you may use without consequence. For long minutes, all shall be muddled and roil on the surface of the flame.
5. If it is most advantageous, store cold for the proper day.

Stolen shamelessly from Ommatidia

Interesting link #10: Alphafleet 101

Visual aids – easier to learn from than walls of text…

Welp

Got an email stating that my google plus account violated its real names policy.

So I deleted my google plus account.

Oh well. Everybody loses.

Interesting link #9: ECM 101

Old, but still relevant.

Red vs Blue

Azual has a good writeup of the eternal war between Red and Blue.

If you’re interested in instant-on, obligation-free pvp action, do yourself a favour and apply to join.

What if? Turret tracking formula was changed

Jester’s post got me thinking about signature radius of ships.As part of the Gallente rebalancing, I was interested in whether Gallente tanking bonuses could be changed to a signature radius reduction instead of the active tanking bonus (which is rarely used except for on the Myrmidon). However, talking to people left me with the impression that while it would work ok for missiles, it wouldn’t work for turrets.

A while back, the missile damage formula was changed to factor in the ‘explosion radius’ of the missile vs the target’s signature radius. This had the effect of preventing cavalry Ravens from demolishing smaller ships by attenuating their damage.

Turrets, however, do not have this damage reduction.

I got to looking at the turret tracking formula, reproduced here:

Existing turret tracking formula.

There’s a few interesting things about this equation.

The first is that there’s a lot of squares and exponents being bandied around, which makes things difficult for a non-mathematician. However, the main thrust is that if you minimise all the numbers, blob becomes close to zero, which means damage shoots up to near 100%. Similarly, if transversal rises, it initially doesn’t make a difference, but as it rises further, the effect gets pretty S curvy and soon enough you’re missing all the time.

It’s also interesting to note that low transversal makes up for a multitide of other problems. If transversal is zero, all tracking numbers become irrelevant. However, the signature radius comparisons also become irrelevant. This leads to Titans volleying battlecruisers and smaller ships as a matter of course.

However, if there is transversal and your target has a huge signature radius compared to your guns, your tracking becomes a lot better. This means that small ships will generally hit larger ships even when orbiting tightly.

Proposal

I’m no math genius but I propose a few changes to the tracking formula to achieve these aims

1. Retain the same tracking for same-ship-size fighting.
2. Do not break MWD signature bloom causing wrecking shots
3. Make signature tanking a (semi) viable option
4. Slightly nerf big ships killing small ships at zero transversal

So, here is my frankenstein formula:

Goodwill Hunting I am not

Let’s run it through, line by line

Line 1

Pretty much the same as the original formula, except that you no longer get tracking penalties for signature radius disparity – only bonuses for hitting large ships. Signature penalties are handled in the next line.

Line 2

The signature penalty is extracted to be totally independent from transversal, meaning a 40m frigate will be hit for about  12.5% damage with 400m battleship weapons, even with zero transversal. However, the tracking of those guns will be a lot better. In fact, I might not need that square root in there if it turns out this part of the formula needs to be more vicious.

Line 3

Range calculations won’t be affected.

Conclusion

This is by no means a perfect formula, but hopefully I have illustrated a way to decouple signature radius from transversal.

I haven’t flesh out the whole idea of ‘gallente = signature tanking’ fully, but turret changes are a necessary precondition to it.

Springtime for Hilmar

The last ten days have been a flurry of dev blogs, with the recent ones featuring an apology and a promise that many of us have heard before.

Eve is out of reinforcement. It’s time to repair her.