Cube-ing the Gate

[Saladinae]

Thought I’d share somethign I’ve been doing for years. If there’s a very particular gate I expect to take a fight at, I use a method called “Cube-ing” the gate with bookmarks a day in advance. You create a Cartesian grid of bookmarks around the gate (using a bookmark next to the gate as the origin) for extreme versatility for warping onto enemies from an infinite number of angles and distances within the cube system.

Here’s a few photos before I show you how to make this system of bookmarks and explain why the bookmarks must be made precisely 167km apart (no other distance shorter or longer is acceptable).

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First, when creating a such a system each bookmark must be more than 150km away from each other, otherwise you cannot initiate warp to the adjacent bookmark. Secondly, if the distances diverge beyond 167km (use 500km for a freakishly large example), you’ll have a large “dead-zone” that you cannot reach because the 100km is the maximum “warp within” distance to the adjacent bookmark, making the first 400km towards the adjacent bookmark inaccessible.

The following photo shows 16 bookmarks (red dots) spaced 167km apart, the black colored spaces represent the areas that are inaccessible (“dead zones”).

Cubing the Gate overlap 16

The next photo shows how the dead-zones are made accessible by creating a sub-grid by creating bookmarks at the center of each dead zone.

Cubing the Gate Subgrid

This grid and it’s partner subgrid can be extended to infinity:

Cubing the Gate overlap infinite 2 D

Since space is 3D, here is a photo showing two 100km spheres encompassing two adjacent verticies of a cube of edge length 167km.

Cu Bing the Gate 3 D overlap and void

Here is the corresponding 3D dead zone when all eight spheres are created at the cube’s 8 corners (only the front four spheres are drawn):

Cubing the gate 3 D void zone

A 3D subgrid is made at the center of each 3D void zone to fully satisfy the volume of the cube, making any point within the cube accessible.

Now, this seems complicated to make, right? No it’s not! It should only take a good hour to make a small cube! Here’s how you do it:

Step 1, create the 7-cross (see pic). Drop a bookmark and label it “origin.” Then open tac overlay and burn in each of the four cardinal directions without changing your height (level your camera flat and manually pilot your ship by clicking directly on the intersection of the tac-overlay axis and the horizon). When you’re done you should have 5 bookmarks on the flat x-y plane. Now you need to make your two bookmarks at the the top and bottom of the z-axis. Warp back to the origin and point your camera straight up and fly 167km upwards from bookmark. Likewise do the same pointing your camera straight down.

In order to ensure accuracy of the bookmarks, make sure that the top and bottom bookmarks are both 167km away from the Origin Bookmark and exactly 235km from the other 4 bookmarks (235km is 167km times the square root of 2), making a square pyramid. See attached pic for the 7-cross.

7 cross

Step 2: Making the 5-cross in the top and bottom plane, you simply warp to the top and bottom bookmarks and treat them as temporary origins and burn 167km in all four cardinal directions using the same method in step 1 by clicking flattening your camera and clicking directly on the horizon along the tac overlay axes. See attached pic:

5 cross

Step 3: Circling the Square! In each of the separate top, middle and bottom planes you’re going to burn in a circle and fill in the missing bookmarks to complete the grid. See attached pic:

Circling the Square

Step 4, last step: Finally, you’re going to bookmark the center of each dead-zone. How do you locate this point? Easy! Just fly from one corner of the cube (cubes) to the opposite corner and stop half-way between them (use the “approach” option to fly to opposite corner). The half-way distance is 145km (one-half 167km times the square root of 3). Do this for all eight dead zones (in this small example, which is the smallest possible example to construct, there are eight dead zones corresponding the negative and positive quadrants of the bisecting square). See pic:

EZ void subgrid

You’re done!

Use an interceptor.

Ideally you should make 6 perches in all 6 cardinal directions 1000km+ from the origin.

Obviously you cannot warp from a Main Grid bookmark to an immediate Sub-grid bookmark since they are 145km from each other. You can extend the distances between the Main Grid to 180km to avoid this problem but you’ll have 8 symmetrically dispersed “dead-pockets” that you won’t be able to access within each cube.

[Saladinae]

Now there are two ways to utilize this Cartesian Warping System.

90% of the time I just eyeball it to a get a good approximate warp-in.

Yet there are times when I use the system to its full potential to get an EXACT warpin on the enemy or an EXACT warpin at my optimals.

So, let’s start with the 2-D case so you can follow me easier when I present the realistic 3D case.

In the photo below, my enemy is located at the Red Dot. The nearest corner is colored Yellow. I draw a line from the yellow from through the Red Dot to see where the line intersects the square. This intersection occurs at the Blue Dot.

Warp within 2 D

I find the nearest corner to the Blue Dot and label this the Regulator Corner, this corner is shaded orange in the photo. Now I find the adjacent corner to the Regulator that is on the same edge as the Blue Dot. I label this the Start Corner, this corner is shaded green.

I now warp from the Start Corner towards the Regulator Corner “within X distance” to land on the blue dot. From the blue dot I warp to the End Corner (yellow dot) “within X distance” to land precisely on the enemy fleet/target location (target location is not always the enemy himself). Notice the Black Diamond in the center of the square. This is “dead-zone” that cannot be accessed by any of the bookmarked corners of the Main Grid. Thus, if my enemy is in the Dead-Zone, I have to switch to the sub-grid bookmarks to get a precise warp in.

Now for the 3D case.

Warp within 3 D

First I find the nearest cube corner to the enemy. I draw a line from that corner (End Corner) through my enemy and determine which face of the cube that line intersects. I shaded the face light purple for this example in the above photo.

Once I’ve determined where the line intersects the face of the cube, the problem is resolved to the simple 2D version from earlier. Label this Point A, which I colored dark purple. Now find the nearest corner of the cube to Point A, and label it Regulator Corner 2, which I colored dark grey in the example.

Draw a line from corner Regulator 2 through Point A and determine where it intersects the edge of the cube, label this Point B, which is colored Blue in this example. The purple line is the one drawn between Regulator 2 and Point A, which produces Point B at its termination.

Now find the nearest corner to Point B and label this Regulator 1, which is colored Orange in the example. Now find the adjacent corner along the same edge as the Regulator 1 corner and label this the Start Corner.

Now we start our journey!
Start from the green Start Corner and warp to Regulator 1 “within X distance” to land on Point B, represented by green arrow.

Now warp to Regulator 2 “within X distance” to land on Point A, represent by Blue Arrow.

Finally warp to the End Corner “within X distance” to land precisely on your enemy! Represented by purple arrow.

If you know some computer programming and trigonometry and parametric equations, you can make a quick script in python or java to determine all the Corners and warp in distances, as well as determining whether or not to use the Main Grid or the Sub-Grid frame for the dead-zones. In order to make use of such a script you’ll need 4 Observers at preset distances from the origin and each other (alts are great for this) which feed their “distance” from enemy from the overview into the python app to get an exact X,Y,Z coordinate relative to the origin. These observers are best placed at 500+km perches away from the origin in four of the six cardinal directions.

Have fun, I revealed my dirty secret! Not gonna tell you how to label your bookmarks or write the python scripts, but I gave you what the essentials to figure it out on your own!