Something has been bugging me about propulsion in EVE.
A Microwarpdrive massively increases your speed, but also makes your signature radius explode — effectively making you easier to hit. Meanwhile, an Afterburner gives a smaller speed boost but doesn’t penalize your signature in the same way.
From a gameplay perspective, I get the balance.
From a “space logic” perspective… I’m not so sure.
If a ship is moving dramatically faster with an MWD, shouldn’t it actually be harder to track and hit? Instead, we get the opposite effect — bigger sig = easier hits. It almost feels like the mechanic is compensating for something rather than representing it.
So I’m curious what people think:
Is the signature bloom just a necessary game balance lever, or does it make sense in-universe somehow? If EVE were redesigned today, would propulsion still work this way?
Could there be a more “physical” alternative (heat, capacitor instability, targeting disruption, etc.) instead of sig bloom?
Or is this one of those mechanics that’s too iconic to ever change?
I’m not arguing it’s bad — just wondering whether we’ve all collectively agreed not to question it too much.
I think, the lore is that the mwd makes you go faster by stutter jumping you through the warp. One of the side effects of this is that you are “brighter” so your signature radius goes up.
In real life we have no such thing as a ‘microwarp’ so assume the design of the MWD is made from a gameplay perspective.
In this game a microwarp drive is faster than an afterburner, but has a few downsides so it’s not objectively a better choice.
Such designs give players choices, creates complexity and and counterplay options and is what makes the game fun without a single simple solution.
MWDs may be faster than ABs but negate the speed advantage with a signature disadvantage so they are not harder or easier to hit, just faster on grid than an AB.
An AB may be slower but reduces incoming damage by being harder to hit due to it’s increased speed.
MWDs drain more capacitor and have cap penalties so they generally are used for short high speed pulses, while ABs can continually be used to fly at a lower yet still increased speed.
MWDs can allow a ship to kite well, but have a weakness that they can be turned off by warp scramblers, unlike ABs.
In short, a lot of game design.
EVE handwaves all space physics by the way, none of this is realistic as in real life it makes no sense for ships to have ‘top speeds’.
They would have top accelerations instead and space battle would be vastly different.
You shouldn’t question it at all. Space is not a vacuum. Space is filled with a very light gas called “aether” instead of “air”. This provides some friction, and warms up real fast when introduced to the heat from a starship thruster, providing a bloom effect that the layman calls a “signature radius”. This is effectively just the approx. radius of the bloom effect, which allows sensors to extrapolate an objects center of mass rather efficiently.
@Gerard_Amatin This actually helped things click for me. I think I was trying to make sense of MWD vs AB from a “how would this work in real space” angle, and that just leads to confusion. Looking at it as a deliberate gameplay trade-off instead makes a lot more sense.
The idea that neither is strictly better—just different tools with different risks—is what I was missing. The signature bloom vs speed, cap pressure vs sustained use, and the scram vulnerability all start to feel less like random drawbacks and more like intentional levers for counterplay.
Also the point about “top speed” vs acceleration really puts it into perspective. It’s not trying to simulate physics, it’s trying to create interesting decisions on grid. I guess the real takeaway for me is: the choice between MWD and AB isn’t about realism or even raw performance, it’s about what kind of fight you’re expecting to take.
You’re flying a spaceship with underwater physics in stellar systems where nothing orbits anything, what kind of realism do you expect?
The mechanics in EVE are all about gameplay. For an instance, it takes a couple of key presses in a database to change the number of physical component slots available in every ship of a class everywhere in the universe… does that make any sense?
In the beginning, all weapons had the same size, and a Battleship was a ship with 8 weapons instead of 4 so it did twice the damage of a smaller ship, period.
Cue weapon sizes, tracking, accuracy, the works… all for gameplay.
I’ve never really thought about this too much and I’ve developed my gameplay around it. I’d say the mechanic makes sense even though it is a fantasy world. A MWD would create a bigger signature than an Afterburner and some ships exploit this, the tracking attribute of turrets also plays a part in the overall signature mechanic.
I guess I only ever questioned it when I didn’t understand it. I once got into a fight on a gate when i was in a vagabond, I was able to kill the cruiser but then a geddon jumped in and there were also a few of his allies in the system and I was stuck on a gate unable to jump with a geddon firing at me.
I had to think fast, I selected a 2.5m orbit on the geddon who was about 12km from the gate and did one burst of my MWD and made sure it turned off after the first cycle completed. I took heavy damage on the approach to the geddon ( I was also trying to mitigate damage by double clicking in space close to the geddon on the approach in order to create a “curve-like” approach while the MWD was on) but then the damage stopped when i got into close orbit, I orbited the geddon for about 40 seconds and then MWD’d back to the gate while taking more damage managed to jump through, I was successfully able to avoid loss and I was jumping for joy.
So as you can see the way the MWD/Signature mechanics are set can allow a skilled pilot to do some really cool moves. I don’t think there is an alternative mechanic to be honest, at this point only minor adjustments can be made to each ship which either increases or decreases their Sig, or perhaps another set of ships can be introduced which have a very low sig and very high tracking along with their other pros/cons.
I definitely think we have all silently agreed, I for one didn’t realise I had a good understanding of the mechanic until i used it to my advantage semingly without thinking. I think it is a logical mecanic which will make pvp’ers plan and stratergize more.
There is also a “kiting” tactic where you find a fast ship with good afterburner bonuses, you can lock a target with a warp disruptor and orbit them with your Afterburner on, the general idea is to find the sweet spot where their turrets have difficulty hitting you due to your low Sig, speed, and curve like movement, If you know the right ships to use and fight against this tactic can be deadly. Again this is good satisfying gamplay if you have a good understanding.
