- ALWAYS MOVE: being at 0 m/s makes you an easy target for any sniper happening to be in the vicinity. So always move: when not aligned to something (and thus moving) pick something in your surroundings and orbit around it; a station or stargate when they are near (so you can jump or dock when need be) or one of your gangmates when in a safespot for instance.
- ALIGNING TO: Often, your FC will ask of you to align to something. This is so noone has to align when the FC jumps the whole fleet and everybody will arrive at the same time at the spot being jumped to. Even in agile frigs, aligntime is still substantial.
Everyone arriving at the same time will ofc introduce the element of surprise
TM, resulting in more dead enemies and less dead gangmates.
- MAKING SAFESPOTS: Safespots are made by bookmarks when in warp. - Open your people and places tab -> places tab -> Add bookmark. Now jump from one point to the other and somewhere in the middle of your jump press the ok-button. The bookmark is made
at the moment you press the ok-button.
There are the quick and dirty safespots, made between 2 'endpoints' (gates, planets, stations, etc.). These are easily compromised though, because you will show up on the overviews of ppl who happen to travel between these points (esp at gate-gate safepoints on busy routes for example).
This is why more complex safespots are usually being made. These safespots are made by going to the safespot I just described and making a safespot between that spot and another point. Now you will have a spot between a random spot on the M1 and Inverness, i.e. backwater. Noone comes where you are now, but you will be findable by scanprobes, so either keep moving or keep track of the 360 degrees directional scan and move as soon as a scan probe appears on the list.
- MODULE CYCLING: When you expect an enemy to pop up any moment, you can choose to start cycling your weapons/ECM/scram/etc. This will make sure you will start firing as soon as you have a lock and will make things a bit more hectic for you. Just start up all your weapons and then target a planet or moon. You will get some message you failed to target nothing, but your weapons will be cycling and you have less risk to accidentally shooting stuff you dont want to shoot (cursor changes back to normal).
There are some
dangers to this tactic though: 1: only use planets or moons as target. When targeting a station or stargate for example, you will start shooting at it and will probably die. 2: When a friendly (repairboat f.e.) locks you, the default is you target him/her back. This will trigger your guns. This can be countered by changing your settings (general settings -> bottom middle column: set 'auto target back' to '0 targets').
Cycling your MWD or AB is usually not advised, as it will eat up cap you will need later.
- ORBITTING: Orbitting makes you harder to hit, due to tracking-issues of the enemy, esp when they have big, slow guns. Smartbombs can be a problem though, so it is advised to orbit at > 6km, which is the largest range a smartbomb can have. You will hit less maybe, but you will live longer.
When two ships are orbiting each other it would seem they wont have tracking difficulties (imagine two ppl holding each other's hands and swirling around, they will keep facing each other and wont have to turn their eyes (guns) to keep looking at each other). This is not how the game dynamics work though. From what I have heard, both angular velocities are added to each other to calculate tracking in this situation.
- SPIRALING APPROACH:
See picture below. When approaching a big ship in a small fast ship it is usually advised not to approach it in a straight line (red line), because this will usually result is esthetically attractive, but unpractical explosions. It is usually better to take the longer, but healthier approach (green line), because using this method, you will probably avoid the guns, due to it's tracking issues. Although I drew the picture in 2D, a 3D approach (the so called 'spiralling approach') is more effective, because your turns will be less sharp and thus will loose less angular velocity in your turns.
Not really trusting my drawing skills, I will explain it a bit. Tracking is measured in rads/second. 360 degrees equals 2*pi~6.28 rad, thus 1 rad equals a bit under 60 degrees. My Tempest's 1200mm artillery (the second largest Large Minmatar artillery) has a tracking of somewhere around 0.015 rad/second. This is with suboptimal skills though and with no/minimal tracking enhancing modules. But expect normal battleships to have somewhere between 0.02 and 0.03 rad/s tracking (ruling out the freaks). In the picture I chose 0.02, because it gave me figures that were easier on the eye. What you need to do to avoid the fire of the tempest's guns is going faster than these 0.02 rad per second around the Tempest. In this example that means you would have <50 seconds to transverse the 60 degrees between the black lines. The black lines are about 60 degrees apart, but that is arbitrary, there is no need to take your turns at 60 degrees, but it is just for the example and it gives you a visual idea of what 1 rad is.
These calculations are for a 2D approach, but you catch my drift.
The exact mathematics are at this moment beyond me, but I have the idea that it doesnt matter how get from the top line to the bottom line (or vice versa), as long as it is in under 50 seconds. A route being square to the second line would be shortest. This means when being far away from the target, you should aim at a 60 degree approach. In the agony course we were advised to fly at a 45 degree angle, but that was at 50 km. When you get closer to the target, the distance between the black lines becomes smaller, and thus you can fly in at a more direct angle, as long as you fly at < 50 secs/rad.
When getting near the target, you can start orbiting at > 6 km.
The approaching ship is most vulnerable at the turning points and at the point where the spiraling approach changes into orbit@. In the latter case you will travel at a straight line to or from the target to reach the desired range. 'Orbit at Current range' thus might be best, but this will take good timing.
Thinking of it again, you might choose for orbit@current and adjust your range when you notice you are not being shot at at that moment. Someone being shot at should IMO avoid adjusting orbit range. This all applies to a single target.
Above can ofc also be used when you are the one being approached. Dont keep your turrets cycling, but fire them now and then; when you see the approaching ship is turning. And ofcourse fly away from the approaching ship, to keep him from entering his range for as long as possible, and forcing him to delay his approach, because he needs to make a more inefficient approach to maintain the high angular velocity.
AGGRESSION TIMER: When in losec, you can't just be firing away at everyone you come across. Although there is no CONCORD to make your life miserable, there are still mechanics that discourage shooting ppl. When shooting someone that isnt flashy red (i.e. very low sec status or has aggressed you first), neutral sentry guns will shoot you and you won't be able to dock or jump through gates, till the aggression timer has counted down (15 minutes). And even when you obey these 'rules', you will have to wait out a 30 second aggression timer to dock or jump through gates. It is advised to take a bit longer in mind (like 60 secs), to rule out effects of lag and such. Don't hang around in this time, but move to safespots or jump from planet to planet, to reduce the chance of being jumped by someone else looking for a fight.
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but after that I can dedicate myself to tanking and electronics (with the 40% time gain mentioned elsewhere) after which I can redistribute again and catch up with spaceship command skills again, then very fast being able to fly a lot of T2 ships.
