The confusion of your tabletop warriors stems from the fact that they think the angular velocity will stay the same for the ship now flying closer. Of course the angular velocity - which is how much “angle within the circle” the ship covers per second and is just another way of indicating how fast full orbit is achieved - will go UP if the ship is still flying at the same (tangential) speed. That means it will make MORE full orbits per time unit and inevitably be harder to hit by a turret gun that has to match that ANGULAR speed i.e. rotate at the same number of degrees per time as that ship is rotating around it. If a gun turret can’t turn fast enough it will of course not hit anything. That is the basis for speed tanking.
A simple numeric example. For the sake of simplicity let’s assume pi to be 3.
A ship flies circles with a (tangential) speed of 10 km/s at a distance of 50 km from the center of the circle. The path that the ship flies is then (circumference of the circle rx2xpi) 50 x 2 x 3 = 300 km long for a full orbit. Every 30 seconds, that ship makes a full orbit (time = distance divided by speed, or 300/10). An orbit is 360 degrees, from which follows that the angular velocity is 12 deg per sec (360 deg divided by 30 seconds for full orbit).
The ship now reduces the distance from the center of the circle, say to 5 km, still flying at 10 km/s. The path is now only 30 km long (5 x 2 x 3), so the ship is now able to make full orbit in 3 seconds, an angular velocity of 120 deg per sec, a factor of 10 higher than before.
To keep a constant angular velocity of 12 deg per second - what your audience seems to believe - the ship would have to slow down by that same factor of ten, now flying at a leasurely 1 km/sec, on that closed path of 30 km, needing once again 30 seconds for a full orbit. This dumb pilot will then become one dead very bad pilot.
But perhaps you are the one who is mistaken, your tabletop friends are shooting missiles in which case they were right.
That is a fine selective abstractization there, I assume the shooter is also just a scripted human only aware of the weapon specs and those other 3 factors you mentioned. In this case, obviously any weapon would be most effective in its optimal range relative to the target speed and vector of movement since this is pure paper math forced to be solved for those variables you want it to.
I think the OP ir rather trying to force his own biased view rather than explaining something to those peeps. Otherwise, for each ammo and weapon type there are fixed coded specs that need nomore explaining and comparison with reallife scenarios is only making it harder. You can set your overlay to display transversal. Your optimal might be 5km or 50km. Getting transversal lower relative to one enemy ship will help your gun type tracking go up, weapons will aply their full damage based on their optimal which can be both closer or further away from target. In rl a missile will do just as much damage to a target if shot at 50m or at 50km away since it doesnt loose explosive power. In Eve it does cause it was coded that way.
In eve you could hit a sitting duck but if its way below coded optimal it will not apply damage. In real life, it will.
As with many other things considering EVE, guns can move only with certain speed because of hamsters. Sometimes they cant keep up with turning the wheels.
If the target that is point blank moves faster than hamsters can turn the gun, the gun cant track target.
Imagine small hamsters moving 1400mm artillery on Minmatar battleship, they cant do everything. Cant do miracles.
Ships aren’t floating tanks. Corvette Class ships nowadays mount Cruise Missiles, Counter-Air Missiles, “Autocannon Turrets” and Close-In Weapon Systems (CIWS). Unlike tanks, which have a 2-3 person crew and some automation, ships have a “large” crew and considerable automation which enables them to use all those weapon systems at the same time.
Ships are also “larger” than tanks, which means they can have each element of each of their weapon system displaced along their hull. If a missile or projectile “outruns” an CIWS element, it’s likely very close to it, but that means that it’s more far away from another CIWS element, which is therefore less “outrunned”.
The real question is not whether or not a corvette has a weapon to combat a foe at some distance, but it’s whether or not it can reliably recognize a foe at that distance. All reconnaissance technology we have these days has a tendency to work better on short range than on long range.
I don’t see why spaceships would be different. Athmospheric effects could “blind” sensors harder than on earth without other sensors being available to overcome that limitation of functionality, but the lower air pressure in space will hardly become more of a range limiter for weapons.
Note that the existance of g-forces in space is prohibitive to having a manned spaceship circle another spaceship at a velocity higher than the one nowadays artillery systems would be able to track it.
Also, if my target rotates my gun turret at 120deg/sec while the turret can only turn 30deg/sec, why not rotate it in the opposite direction and intercept the target at it’s predicted location in 2-3 seconds?
They are 100% correct. For a given level of error in shot placement (which is measured in degrees of deviation from the aim line) you will always be more accurate at closer range. A 1 degree deviation is a tiny error from 10’ away, but misses by literal miles from 500 miles away. The only exception would be if you had some form of guided weapon with a minimum range, where accuracy at short range is poor because it doesn’t have time to properly lock and begin to track the target.
What you’re confusing is accuracy and EVE’s abstraction of DPS math. Tracking speed is representing just that: the ability of your gun turrets to rotate fast enough to line up a shot at all. A shot may be perfectly accurate at close range, but if your gun turret can’t rotate fast enough to aim at the target then it might as well be a missed shot. But this isn’t a realistic representation of how tracking high speed targets works. EVE ignores the ability to predict a target’s motion, move the turret into place to aim at a spot ahead of where it is now, and take the shot as the target reaches the aim point. This is obviously less firepower than being able to track a target continuously and deliver sustained fire, but you do still get to hit. EVE, on the other hand, abstracts that DPS away to zero and pretends that you can’t do this.
However, in case of EVE, deviation in battle is measured not in degrees, but in distance. Enemy ship can maneuver, and in result you do not know an exact location of it when you prepare a shot, but rather a sphere of fixed radius where this hull would be.
If enemy ship is close, this results in greater deviation and poorly-placed shots.
Which is stupid and has nothing to do with how real weapons would work. EVE’s combat math is an approximation created for game balance reasons, don’t try to justify its realism.
This is a poor example because it is masking the inaccuracy of the long-range shot. It might be hard to successfully point your camera at the fly, but if it’s in the center of the screen when you pull the “trigger” your “shot” will hit. The distant car or train may be easier to keep on screen but the vast majority of the screen’s area is a clear miss and even if the target is well centered you’re still probably going to miss.
No it isn’t. A bullet is only hitting a single point, not everything on the screen. Take it to the extreme: if you were on the moon aiming your phone back at the car you’d have the entire planet on the screen, but are you going to say that the entire planet is “hit” by your “shot”? Of course not.
Make the screen really small and it’s still easier to track a car at a distance
No, it really isn’t. Make the screen sufficiently small so that it’s only showing the point where your “shot” will hit and you’ll find that it’s extremely difficult to track that car. The slightest wobble in your aim takes you way off target, and at a long enough distance you reach a point where you literally can’t hold the camera steady enough to see your target at all. The ONLY reason it appears easy to track the car is that the wide field of view captures a huge volume at once and you count it as a success if the target is anywhere in that volume.
Here you are mixing two parameters, namely the angle of deviation and the absolute deviation. While the absolute deviation measured as a distance will always be smaller close by than at long distance (simple sinus rule), the angular deviation in the example of speed tanking will not. Here’s why:
If the ship flying closer by doesn’t slow down its tangential speed (the one it had at long distance) because it is trying to speed tank…, its angular speed vs the turret obviously goes up because of the smaller radius of the trajectory of the ship. For a given maximum tracking speed of the guns, the number of degrees of deviation will go up in that case, in other words ‘chance to hit’ as OP means will drop.
Easy visualization, and some here may actually have done this as a kid:
put a model airplane with an engine running at constant speed at one end of a rope and hold the rope at the other end. The plane will fly in circles around you. Now start roping it in. The circles become smaller because of the smaller radius ( less rope) while the plane is still flying at the same (tangential) speed resulting in faster orbits. You have to turn faster and faster with each reduction of rope to keep your eyes on the plane, until you can’t follow (track) anymore.
Except, again, that’s not how guns work. The better analogy is that, as the plane is crossing your field of view faster than you can turn, you give up on maintaining continuous eyes on it and look at a fixed point on its circle. Every time it crosses that point you “fire”, and each “shot” has a much higher chance of hitting than one fired from a longer distance.
EVE’s combat math assumes an unrealistic fire control system programmed by an idiot, where the guns try to aim exactly at the target’s current position at all times and have no ability to predict its path or set up an intercept point.
