Curved warp paths

Yeah, it still is not a curve in any way at all.

A small mobile warp disruptor I has a warp disrupt range of 5km.

Even if the warp is only 1 AU long (1.496e8 km), the angle of warp to still be bubbled is 0 degrees (so small that you need to go out to a couple of dozen decimal places to see anything.

The warp itself is straight (space is big).

So if the ship will still be bubbled, then the only thing this is, is a change in the angle required before align state is achieved.

Instead of being within 15 degrees, you are saying it should be something bigger.

and no, ships don’t move in an arc. They move straight towards the warp point while aligning. The requirement is their angle of rotation is within 15 degrees of the target and they are at 75% of max speed, but the travel is always straight. I get it that you are saying this should be changed, but why? What practical purpose does it serve when it isn’t a curved warp at all. It’s still perfectly straight as it is now.

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Curved warp is a good model when the path let you in normal space with full collision mechanics, you can’t go to warp if ships / items / planets are on the way. It’s too early for this game.

I believe the curved warp can be limited to a + or - 30 angle of degrees. Or if doing an 180 angle degrees then the ship cant go at their full warp speed and only do .05 to 1 AU warp speed given the space that need to do the turn, giving the time to attackers to track them down and wait at the end of the warp path.

I did some maths.

Pie slices represent the angle needed to slide past the edge of a small anchored catch bubble if warping to a gate. Labels added to show distance from gate. This is for the angle of entry. I’m making the assumption that the curvature of the warp is consistent the entire warp.

At 50km from the gate, the angle subtended is a mere 5.7 degrees. Right around 150km, you cut in under 2 degrees. These are tiny angles that you’re barely going to perceive. If you can’t perceive them, then why advocate this change?

If the above assumption is not true, and the curve followed something like a the PDF of a Rayleigh Distribution, then all bets are off. For long warps, the curve would only matter at the start, and wouldn’t matter at the end. Then for short warps, it becomes increasingly difficult to actually calculate the correct path. For really short paths, you can approximate it by a arc of constant curvature (see earlier).

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You’re misunderstanding me here. The goal of warping in combat is (barring tactical warps on-grid), pretty much without exception, to get your behind off grid quickly before someone blows it off. With what you are proposing there is literally no downside, because I can maintain an orbit against whatever I’m fighting and warp off at pretty much any time towards anything. That it will take me more time to do so is no disadvantage since the enemy has no idea what I’ve just warped to, has no way to follow me, and has no way to touch me while I’m in warp.

This is purely making people harder to catch, there’s basically no downside for the person trying not to be caught.

There’s no reason for a buff like this to escape mechanisms, it’s already quite easy to avoid being caught by a third party while PvEing or often even PvPing. This just exacerbates that.

Again, I reiterate, if you don’t think Warp Drive Operation is useful you haven’t seen enough of the game. It is, you’re just not familiar with the ships or situations where it comes up.

Which is a tiny and questionable valuable benefit on top of the massive issues it creates when trying to actually catch someone while PvPing.

EDIT: Oh and the whole warp bubbles thing. Considering a bubble can be as far as 500km off the target you’re looking at tiny changes in approach angle to completely miss any bubble that isn’t practical on top of the thing you’re trying to warp to.

To add to the above math posts. At 100km a T1 Large bubble only needs a 15 degree change to miss the bubble completely. At 150km it’s 10 degrees. At the limit of 500km it’s 3 degrees for a T1 and 4.6 degrees for a T2.

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So the OP doesn’t like gatecamps. Got it.

Stupid idea.

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Gatecamps are fine.

Well, it is slower than a pre-aligned warp.

Indeed you could.

Taking more time is a disadvantage even if the enemy doesn’t know where you warped to, which would be an advantage. If you’re trying to run, the enemy could probably make a good educated guess as to where you could be warping to. Also, CCP could also add non-cloaked warp paths to d-scan or some other part of the scanning system.

Maybe someday we’ll be able to effect each other in warp, but it would probably require slower warp speeds.

And I’ll re-iterate that I have seen enough of the game to understand the skill’s usefulness during certain circumstances. I didn’t say the skill was useless or irrelevant, just not as relevant as it could be.

Kind of a moot point considering someone could warp to a different celestial and warp to the target destination at an angle that would avoid the bubble entirely. If you want to prevent people from getting to a certain place you need to bubble it in it’s entirety. A curved warp won’t help someone get to a destination that is thoroughly bubbled like it should be.

Curved warping is not a way to avoid bubbles or avoid capture. It’s just a different or perhaps more convenient way to warp.

That’s barely a downside when the enemy can’t tell where you warped to follow you nearly instantly, and if the warp path straightens out pretty quickly the time difference will be tiny.

For reference a 50 AU warp that goes off at a completely 90 degree angle to the destination, which would probably be the longest possible path here assuming no sort of correction, so you make a full half circle to your destination, would still only be about 75AU, which would take at worst an extra 12 seconds in a battleship on a warp where your align time is probably 12 seconds or greater.

So for this to be any sort of time loss at all in a Battleship you need to be warping to something more than four times your align speed away in AU, give or take.

I’m not certain you understand what a huge buff this is to ratting ships and to their safety…

Which would be a pretty significant time investment on their part, all for something that would still end up being a buff since any time you might gain from their warp will be lost in actually aligning to the path and getting into warp yourself.

Plus, as already demonstrated with math in this thread, the actual time increase would be relatively small.

It would require a complete rewrite of the game engine and its code. It’s actually possible to kill someone while they’re warping right now with smart bombs, but it’s just short of being a bug or exploit and it’s certainly not intended. It’s an artifact of the game engine.

Okay, but you could say that for any skill or ship or module. That doesn’t make it a bad thing or a problem, let alone something that needs this kind of drastic change to basic gameplay.

Bouncing between celestials is both easier to cover against and more time consuming than an angled warp path would be under literally all circumstances. As it is not warping directly gate to gate is standard practice.

What you’re suggesting would still pretty much invalidate drag bubbles by making it even easier to avoid them and it would absolutely be used as a way to avoid bubbles by anyone with an ounce of sense since it’s the same align time off a gate either way and it’d be shorter than bouncing to a celestial.

They’d be all but gone with these changes. Maybe bubble camps in very large null systems, but lowsec good luck catching anything with a camp. They just spin up their drive and warp away, no need to align to anything, just go.

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Indeed, one just needs to get up to speed to warp so you have that time window to catch them or you have to chase them if you want to destroy them. Poorly set-up gatecamps are easy to escape from, but not so with a good set-up. If I’m in a frigate/destroyer and an insta-lock thrasher catches me on the bounce I can kiss my ship goodbye as he’ll deliver full damage before I can get my tank online. Cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships are all much easier to catch.

Strictly speaking this wouldn’t change warping off of a gate in Low, since when you jump through your ship (regardless of what the client is showing you) isn’t actually facing any given direction, so you’ll always take the listed time to warp off grid after a gate jump regardless of direction.

This does’t really change that this is a bad idea though. There’s no good reason for a buff to ships escaping every other possible situation.

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Just have to have a fast lock speed and enough points to stop someone.

@Elzon1, care to respond to this?

FYI you’ve double-quoted me for some reason.

That’s not how this works. As soon as I hit warp if I’m aligned I’m no longer lockable. Also someone warping in on me has to leave warp before they can lock or scram me, so bare minimum I’ve got a couple of seconds to hit warp.

Please please please go read about the mechanics you’re looking to take a sledgehammer to before posting ideas like this.

This is kind of what it would look like (the curve is only to realign to the destination while in warp):

For it’s usefulness/convenience.

So, basically just a massive buff to getting off grid in a hurry.

You’ve completely failed at any point in this thread to justify why such a buff is desirable or needed. Not everything that is convenient to an individual player is good for the game. It would be amazingly convenient if I could jump my ship to a valid Cyno anywhere in the Eve Universe. It would also be incredibly broken. This is the same thing. There is absolutely no way to catch a ship with this system after they hit “warp” unless you manage to get a bubble onto them before they slide off grid, which would be about two ticks under most circumstances, or less than the amount of time it actually takes a ship to drop out of warp after it appears on grid.

Just no.

I don’t understand this image. Why is the path looping back on itself? Please explain it to me.

So you say they’re not going to nerf bubbles into irrelevancy, but you’re still saying they’re convenient…

It’s a dog fighting maneuver. Basically a backflip but you have to barrel roll obviously to be right side up.
Theres also one where instead of doing that you barrel roll first and then do a backflip so your approaching from beneath.

Has nothing to do with space so dunno why he’s posting it lol.

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He’s basically trying to justify this as somehow not affecting bubble intercept pathing at all because instead of looping around the system the ship will, for whatever reason, warp off and then loop back onto the path it would have gone on if you had aligned normally.

As near as I can tell OP really hates having to turn and align to the thing he wants to warp to before he warps to it. Never mind how stupidly OP this would be.