Survivability vs Maneuverability

Sector Conquest suicide ship, period.

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My recon can swoop the whole team from the spawning point. That is the force of a recon, you don’t need to expose yourself to reveal all the enemies :01010:

bah i just drop a micro locator and u see 10 people trying to destroy that thing

Currently my speed in my Eagle B is 606M/s with AB. Needless to say im a Covert Op that can act as a recon by swooping by the enemy team, distracting them by making them shoot at me and inherently miss, and swoop out to stafey.

sometimes i see intercepter pilots with such high dodging skills, like if they are extremely damaged and they are trying to get away, they can still dodge enemies that are shooting at them. This leave me with questions:how do you know how sharp your turn is and if it will dodge prjectiles? Because im not sure how sharp my turn needs to be to dodge, but at the same time im trying to reach my team as fast as possible. And how do you guys know when the prjectiles is coming? For example, there was this guy pilotin interceptor and he was almost dead and he was flying pretty straight, not hard to shoot down,but right when i shot gauss cannon at him he did a quick maneuver and doged it

Not sure if my question really made sense,i couldnt really explain what i was thinking

 

curious on where maneuverability becomes survivability,

 

speed  affects length of lead indicator

acceleration  affects how fast lead indicator twitch around (from short to long state)

projectile speed and distance between target is your  reaction time window

size of  target hitbox  and projectile  hitscan radius  determines effective maneuverability

 

Lead reticle uses the distance between you and your target, his vector and your projectile speed to deduce a point in space you need to aim at in order to land a hit.

 

Time between you making that shot and your projectile reaching the target is the amount of time the target has to change vector in order to evade getting shot. ie his reaction time window.

This time is further reduced by hitbox and hitscan radius sizes. If both are big enough and acceleration and speed slow enough it can make it impossible to avoid getting hit no matter what you do provided projectile speed is fast enough to reduce the reaction time window.

 

Where maneuverability becomes survivability can be determined by reversing that scenario.

 

Assume hitbox size is constant, hitscan radius is constant along with projectile speed and distance while the only variable is speed and acceleration. When piloting defensively, these two are in your direct control. Pulsing afterburners and WASD will cause changes in lead reticle position. Assuming further that people use the lead indicator to aim,  if you are able to twitch that reticle faster than a human can react to it you have effectively transformed maneuverability into survivability.  Rate of Change of target lead indicator is the determinant.

 

 

Speed vs Acceleration, hitbox size

 

Ideally you would want both speed and acceleration to be as high as you can make them. But if you had to choose, hitbox size determines which one has priority.

Small  hitbox benefits having higher  speed  and the opposite for  big  ships where  acceleration  is more beneficial.

 

Take the interceptor with its’ small size. Speed affects the length of the lead reticle. The higher the speed, the longer it is. If you are fast enough, the difference in length of lead indicator between max cruising speed and afterburner speed can be more than the size of the ship itself. Pulsing afterburner off and on in this case is enough to make someone miss their shot for example.

 

This normally isn’t true for Frigates. Say if you are looking at a frigate length wise with its big rectangular hitbox in full view. Pulsing between a full stop and max afterburner speed may not be enough to cause the difference in length of the indicator to make someone miss considering the reticle originates from center mass. In-fact missing the the exact point on the reticle can still score you a hit because the ship is that big.

 

But say the frigate had a huge acceleration rate and pulses between strafing left and right. For half a second the lead indicator would be on the right side of the ship and the next half second it would be on the left while in reality the ship is still basically in the same spot. But if a human player aims at the lead reticle he will miss even if he shoots dead center on the indicator because the ship did not actually move. Acceleration caused the prediction to over estimate the flight path.

 

You can complicate the concept further by including Turn Radius but just my personal opinion, Speed and Acceleration have a bigger share on defensive maneuvers. Except in inty vs inty dogfights where both ships joust for a firing solution. But honestly, even in a dogfight both ships are technically on the offence and neither is evading one another. This isn’t to say turn speed does not aid in making someone miss but the reality of actual combat relegates it to almost exclusively an offensive tool. And I don’t consider it as survivability per se. More DPS related than HP imho. During a match and the focus of someone’s attention you will always have a need to travel from one place to another. Turn speed isn’t used as much in dodging shots when you are trying to get from respawn to a beacon while being fired at mid commute. But when on the offence and orbiting a frigate doing both staying out of his crosshairs and trying to kill him at the same time it is all about turn speed and strafe ratio. Again - it complicates things and you can get away with more than enough focusing on speed + acceleration.

 

 

Here is an old video of mine demonstrating acceleration pulsing to avoid LRF snipers in a slow frigate. What would be more interesting is to see me from their POV and how erratic I caused their lead indicators to behave. But alas … no match replay feature.

 

Interesting post Kine.