Are there any videos specific to the arty/figure 8 method you mention? That would be interesting to me.
I do Uās below my targets, every time my gun cycles i switch direction to start a new U. The idea is the same, have a low angular velocity while you are taking the shot just to immideatly speed up again. This is also where agility comes in, with better agility the time window to take the shot gets smaller.
Flying a 8 is a natual alternative that happens sometimes instead of Oās below your target where you do tighter turns and therefor use less of your potential speed. But these movements rarely happen perfectly, if you fly a ship alot you get a feeling for how hard to need to do a turn to track better.
Also research transversal matching, instead of just dropping your speed against slow targets, you need to match the way you are going to apply against faster ones. This is also what Ovi is refering to, flying a 8, transversal matching every time you want to apply and otherwise speed tanking. But this is all practice and quite advanced.
In my vid against brave https://youtu.be/UZ_7N1X5VEw my movements are all about making the artys work aswell, however flying like tikk to make even small chremoas artys work requires a good feeling for the serverticks.
If you want more vids i recommend https://youtu.be/4yBTaqiMrX4 and his āSuper Nerdy Slicerā Video, but you probably know Chessur.
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Thatās impressive. For the cycle time and turn times, Iād assume this is mostly relevant in arty boats? Iāve done some alpha shooting where I tried stuff like that but nothing in active maneuver and Iāve never seen anyone successfully do it.
I may have to look it up and see what heās doing.
Iāve always played commands based on relative advantage ranges and speedsā¦ and been quite successful with it.
Yeah, running back and forth to egg out a kite orbit or trying to bounce a speed boat off a station is manual I guess, but it fails to be the barrel roll extravaganza I expect when I hear people singing the praises of āmanual flyingā.
I still canāt visualize the use of flying Us and figure 8sā¦ unless everyone is in range boats taking sniper shots at each other? Not sure. When Iām flipping from one maneuver command to another and fanning the AB, itās all I can do to keep from burning up my guns and AB.
In a defense of my skill set:
Here is an example of a fleet takedown I did with another guy 8 years ago in Osvest (Iāve done a couple small fleet takedowns but this was the largest Iāve done):
Enemy fleet was about 25 boats, me and Nolimitsoldier held the field until they retired.
They did bag me the next day when I tried to solo them.
Last week on Singularity where I was sitting tethered at the CCP Keepstar in M-OEE8, a kikimora was poking me for a 1v1 in my newly fit muninn, which was only the second time after my maiden voyage with this ship and I didnāt quite pay much attention and before I knew it, I was out of the tether and scrammed by the most op ship in the game.
Anyhow, you donāt want to be scrammed in an arty muninn - ever.
So the kikimora was spooling up and of course those artilleries didnāt hit him very well - until I rapidly switched directions, flying all over the place and tada - a wrecking shot at 10m in front of the hull 1342hp damage, so he in structure at this point and I couldnāt hit him again but if that boat was so op, a second graze would have been all that was needed to kill it.
I didnāt have enough room to take depleted uranium with me and I am still getting familiar with projectile ammo but the point is, that even in the worst situations, manual piloting is vital.
Shhhhhā¦ That supposed to be a secret. Donāt tell anyone.
But If you wanted to minimized his traversal, why not just fly at maximum speed in a straight line?
That would minimize his transversal relative to your speed (as you dragged him) because it would give you the highest possible speed to mitigate his orbit into a chase.
I could maybe see timing a shot as he fell behind you to turn, as that would be the slowest moment of transversal.
He canāt stop orbit without letting you goā¦ because he has a scram.
If you could hold the same speed as him, every shot would have hit perfectly, giving you the win easily.
I fail to see how the speed loss of turning for any reason would benefit you here unless you were attempting to mitigate inbound damageā¦ but as the arty guy that additional transversal control is worth its weight in gold.
I canāt wrap my head around how the maneuvering benefitted you more than speed would have if your win would have been prediCated on minimizing transversal.
His tracking would have been much faster here, speed would have been your salvation.
Well the fight happened under the worst condition possible. I pull a little range and he pretty much sits in my windshield the entire time and I noticed to late that I was already out of tether range - derp.
So he just hit āorbit 500mā and I was slow than him but since he just kept orbiting, I zoomed in at max and tried to mini-slingshot him and it worked. He was surprised that I hit him 3 times, though only slight grazed and one really bad smashing shot.
What I did was making a 360Ā° spin on my own axis and when he was in front of me the arties hit him - ouch.
You do a parallel flight in a battleship too when you are trying to hit a super small target with large guns.
What you do is, you donāt hit approach, you look on the tactical overview where he is going and then pilot your ship at a parallel course in the same direction, which low lower your transversal and you will be able to hurt him a lot.
I remember doing that with a Nightmare a few time, trying to hit a Deacon at 117km with my tachyons. The Deacon didnāt make it after altering my course to his.
To give some examples:
-
Youāre in a t3 destroyer and you found a battleship running a gated site. You take the gate and land 50km off. You need to close range in order to tackle the battleship, but if you burn straight towards him heāll be able to land a perfect blow. Note that setting a small orbit while you are at long range is practically the same as burning straight in.
So you head towards him at a 30-45 degree angle, shallow enough that you close distance on him quickly, wide enough that your angular velocity (everyone mentions transversal, but really itās angular velocity that counts!) is high so he cannot hit you. In order to avoid just burning past him you need to adjust the angle at which you are approaching every few seconds. That is what is called spiralling in, one of the forms of manual piloting. -
You live in a c5-c5 wormhole and notice your neighbours are trying to roll away from you. Your scout reports an archon jumping through, but your response fleet was just a bit slow. The archon has spotted the fleet on d-scan and cloaks up just before your fleet lands. So you know there is a cloaked carrier on grid, but didnāt get a good visual on where he cloaked. The only thing you know is he is about 10-15km from the WH and moving towards it at about 10m/s hoping to get lucky, jump back and roll.
You need to decloak him, but simply orbiting the WH will not cover the entire sphere of locations where he might be, so you manually pilot, trying to do an orbit with continually changing inclination.
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If you get scrammed with long range guns fitted you can also use your enviroment. See where the enemy autoorbit takes him, then fly right next to a gate or station and make him bump on it, you can use that moment to get a good hit.
not effective when you are webbed and scrammed.
Web and scram suggest āin neutrangeā too, wich is something. If you get caught in scramrange without a plan B to deal with brawlers your happy little misstake happend quite a bit before scramrange. 
Any time your chance to hit <1% and your actually manage to roll a hit, itās an automatic wrecking shot.
Because simply hitting ākeep at range xxxxā wonāt necessarily put you in the best position to hit them depending on where in their current manoeuvre they are.
For years I was like yourself, simply replying on orbit, keep at range and align preset manoeuvres to engage in combat. And I got good at it and it works for 75-80% of the time but for the other 20-25% you need the ability to directly command you ship to go āin this direction RIGHT NOWā to setup the right parameters to affect your desired manoeuvre being hitting you target, sling shotting to get into/out of range etc.
once I āgot itā I started using it a lot more as habit and I found my combat efficiency it increase quite quickly at that point. So much so that I started using it almost exclusively in PvE even!
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You are right. As soon as you get into nice small scale fights (5-10 vs 5-10), you need to get into the tactical overview and piloting manually. Otherwise your āorbit at x kmā could lead into range of other enemies.
Example for that situation, how to prevent and perform:
Given situation - you will tackle the undermost ship of that gang. You can keep orbiting by command stupidly, and can find yourself on every possible position on the surface from a spheric with the target in the centre ( ā probably you will get into range of the others), or you keep āorbiting manuallyā the whole time under the target with the specific range, while piloting in a circle under him, because the enemys are above him. There is no command for that at all, but itās necessary to do a good job.
Itās only one specific situation, and you have to adjust your piloting every second, because the ship distribution will change on the grid every second.
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Thank you all! It was nice to read an intelligent and enlightening post for a change.
Reading this made me think of my playstyle. The first FCās I flew under made us do a lot of maneuvering so I learned it without even knowing it I guess. My playstyle now is a simple combo of both. (for both pvp & pve) If looks like an easy kill, then I just bore in and use orbit. But if I think Iām going to have to work for it, Iāll do manual. Take every edge in a battle. I even learned a new trick here! 
And even though Iām rusty at the game, its still kinda second nature to take manual control for me. Frankly, its something every good pilot should learn. Its also fun sometimes as some of the gameplay can get boring. PVE is good practice also.
And when that miner has buried himself in an asteroid belt hoping the rocks and drones will uncloak me, its always fun to creep your way in and snag him! 
Edit; you can adjust your overview to show transversal and velocity. I have a tab just for battles. I think everyone should even if its just for emergencies, but thatās just me.
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Unless they changed something transversal was always the easy mistake to make.
Turret tracking was in rad/s which is angular velocity and that will tell you directly if your turrets have any chance to hit your target.
Angular vel and regular velocity were the first two columns in my old overview setupā¦ need to redo that again 
In pve as well. Viability of some ships in L4 missions depends on your ability to pull transversal - vs whole group of rats, which you canāt do with simple orbit command.
Kiting.
Example:
Def not a myth
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