Navigating Your System - 19th October

19/10/2011 Navigating your System

This is a copy of the log, from an ISD session on navigating around eve. The expert was ISD Tipene

The Log

ISD Tipene > Hi there and thanks for joining us for the third in our series of seminars
ISD Tipene > Just before we being, this here is the main seminar channel, the q and a channel is for any questions you can think of as we go on
ISD Tipene > And ion will try and find a way to drop them into here and i'll do my best to answer them
ISD Tipene > So before we being, do we have any questions?
ISD IonCharge > The name of the second channel is without quotes "Seminar Q&A" (with an ampersand). Please make sure you are in both.
ISD Tipene > Ok i'll assume not so let's begin :)
ISD Tipene > Now today I'm going to be covering some general and specific advice on traveling around eve
ISD Tipene > Generally in eve, there are 2 methods of day to day propulsion, slower than light thrusters, and faster than light warp drives. Today’s Seminar is about using the warp drive for more than just travel from A to B.
ISD Tipene > An important concept of the warp drive, is that to travel anywhere it needs a destination; which can either be a celestial object in your current system, a bookmark you have previously created or a fleet member.
ISD Tipene > There is no warp 1 AU in that direction unfortunately :)
ISD Tipene > The other limitation of the warp drive system, is that you are only able to warp to an object 150km or more away from you. That’s not to say though that 150km is the minimum you can warp however.
ISD Tipene > Say for example you and a friend are fleeted up and are trying to take down an enemy, one of you in a quick ship, another in a slow but more powerful ship. If your enemy is also in a quick ship you may never bring your guns to bear on him.
ISD Tipene > Now imagine he’s orbiting 50km away from you, outside your gun range, laughing at you as you can’t hit him. So you and your friend come up with an idea. He in the quick ship travels 150km away from you and waits.
ISD Tipene > As soon as he drops between you and your friend, you warp straight to your friend at the range 100km. Essentially you warp 50km and land straight on top of him. This is an example of a short tactical warp that can get you the drop on targets.
ISD Tipene > Another example of this can be seen in the eve is real trailer. Where a small interceptor heads straight into an opposing fleet. The entire fleet then warps to 0 to the interceptor and lands straight on top of the enemy. Much pew pew then takes place :)
ISD Tipene > Another common way of using the warp drive to an advantage is the use of bookmarks in a system.
ISD Tipene > These are more commonly used in a system that's either your home or a system you know you'll be fighting over. Common bookmarks that are used at:Instant UndocksSniper positionsUndock points
ISD Tipene > I'll go over these about how they work and how you would go setting them up.
ISD Tipene > Firstly the instant undock. When you undock from a station in eve you are shot from a certain point of the stations model.
ISD IonCharge > To those who have just recently joined this channel, please also join Seminars Q&A to ask questions and discuss the seminar in progress.
ISD Tipene > Now if your station was being camped by your enemy, and you need to warp somewhere that's directly behind where you undock from, this would mean slowing down, changing direction and speeding up again.
ISD IonCharge > Seminar Q&A *
ISD Tipene > Plenty of time to be hit on all sides and warp scrambled
ISD Tipene > Imagine if however, you took a fast ship and flew directly away from the undock point, traveling 150km+ away from it. If you then drop a bookmark (people and places, places tab, add bookmark), next time you need to undock, you can warp to this.
ISD Tipene > Now in the older days of eve you always undocked at the same angle, nowadays there is a 5 degree margin of error, so it can take some fine manouvering to get this point exactly right.
ISD Tipene > But if you do, you get to warp away and enrage any wannabe station campers
ISD IonCharge > A small footnote: bookmarks are created your position when you press 'ok' in the create bookmark window, not when you press 'add bookmark' in people and places.
ISD Tipene > I was coming to that Ion :)
] ISD Tipene > Sniper pointsThese would be setup near to choke points, such as stations and gates. In eve we have long range ships that shoot all the way up to 250km from it's target.
ISD Tipene > As the maxiumum warp range is 150km and are usually fairly predictable this can cause issues. One way around this would be to create a net of bookmarks around a gate or station, all the way out to 250km
ISD Tipene > This means that A) YOur snipers have a point they can warp to, to instantly start to deal damage on their targets, and B) if the enemy starts to get near to them, they can warp to another sniper position and repeat from there
ISD Tipene > Such on grid warping though, will shut down any locks you have, and disable guns, and other directed modules
ISD Tipene > Lastly, undock pointswhen you warp to station you warp to a sphere around the station, where the system classes you as being 0m away from the station, but in fact you can be many KM away from the actual model
ISD Tipene > This can mean that if somone undocks, you will both read as being 0m from the station but sometimes up to 10-15km away from each other.
ISD Tipene > One way of getting around this, is placing a bookmark exactly when you undock from the station. Next time you need to get to either the undock point or a certain range from it, you can use this bookmark
ISD Tipene > Lots of people do it in different ways, but if you are going to start laying bookmarks like this, one thing I have to stress from my own expience, is give them names that make sense to you.
ISD Tipene > The last thing you want to do when you want to move to a new sniper position, is warp right into the middle of a battleships guns :)
ISD Tipene > These bookmarks, are all typically what's known as on Grid. A grid is an area of space that contains objects like stations and asteroid belts etc
ISD Tipene > But what happens if you want to hide, either yourself or a fleet?
ISD Tipene > Well this is where Safespots come into play.
ISD Tipene > A safespot is a point in space which should ideally contain nothing, so far away from station gates and such so that people can't just randomly drop in on you.
ISD Tipene > You can create a safe spot in one of two ways.
ISD Tipene > Firstly if you have time before hand, you can setup a safe spot in between 2 celestial objects.
ISD Tipene > If you are at say the sun, and you choose to warp to a planet at the far reach of the system, you would do so with your people and places window open.
ISD Tipene > After you are in warp, and randomly along the route, you would place the bookmark to create your safe spot.
ISD Tipene > As Ion pointed out earlier, a bookmark isn't create when you click the add bookmark button from the people and places though. You can fill out all the info from that page such as name and description, and it's only actually when you click OK
ISD Tipene > that your current position is then saved as a bookmark
ISD Tipene > Now this bookmark is directly between 2 objects
ISD Tipene > If you wanted to be extra paranoid, you could then warp to a third object in your system and place another bookmark half way along the route.
ISD Tipene > Doing so means that you are no longer in line with any normal warp paths of the system. Doing so then removes the slight risk of somone landing on you by chance
ISD Tipene > If however you haven't got time to setup a safespot before hand there is another method which you can use if being chased, which means you want land on any normal point in space
ISD Tipene > As many a new player knows, your warp drive requires capacitor to run, and if you don't have enough you won't make it all the way.
ISD Tipene > Initiating warp eats all the capacitor the ship needs in one go before getting into warp.
ISD Tipene > If you start to warp, and then cancel the warp (ctrl space to slow down), you could keep doing this until your capacitor is almost all gone
ISD Tipene > Running modules, like shield boosters would have course have the same affect
ISD Tipene > What this means is that when you finally warp off, you won't make it all the way and drop out somehwhere along the route
ISD Tipene > So a safespot, with no prior setup required :)
ISD Tipene > One last way, is using sites of missions that you have run. These can be located quite away from the usual areas of a system but can be a double edged sword as mission sites can sometimes spawn in fixed locations
ISD Tipene > so you could accidently land on somone else or their mission :)
ISD Tipene > Now that's how to create, them but what about how to bust them?
ISD Tipene > The exact mechanics of finding these will be covered in another session as it is quite in depth
ISD Tipene > But generally it works as follows
ISD Tipene > Firstly to find somone in space, everyones ship has an onboard scanner
ISD Tipene > If you are in space alt D will bring this up
ISD Tipene > and it's the directional scan that we're interested in
ISD Tipene > If you are in space it might be easiest to try this along as I describe it
ISD Tipene > If you see the directional scanner interface, you have several options, a tick box to use your overview settings (if you leave it unticked it can find almost anything and give you info overloard)
ISD Tipene > a range, and an angle
ISD Tipene > The max range you can enter into your scanner is 2147483647 KM
ISD Tipene > This is a big number and equates to 14.3 AU as the crow warps
ISD Tipene > Lastly you have the angle. If you click on your ship a box will apear
ISD Tipene > Imagine a line going straight from your camera point of view, through the box and extending to infinity aftwards
ISD Tipene > This is 0 degrees
ISD IonCharge > (it might be easier if you zoom out)
ISD Tipene > setting it say 30 degrees would form an invisible cone of 30 degrees around that imaginary line
ISD Tipene > That's where you'll scan
ISD Tipene > So if you are in space, try it now, set the angle to 360 degress, put as high a number as you like into you range and give it a go if you haven't before
ISD Tipene > If you are in a busy area of space, you should see lots of ships, from mission running, mining ships etc
ISD Tipene > If you start to reduce the angle, you can now start to pinpoint where abouts this ship might be
ISD Tipene > You could get lucky and find a ship near a planet and try warping to them
ISD Tipene > The directional scanner doesn't let you warp to things directly, that's where probes come in (which are covered in another session)
ISD Tipene > One other use of the scanner, is as a motion detector ala Aliens
ISD Tipene > say your out in 0.0 all by yourself running a mission you never should have accepted in the first place
ISD Tipene > You know you have time to warp off however as you're keeping your eye on your directional scanner. Set to 360 degrees, you can start to see if any probes or enemy fleets pop up
ISD Tipene > If they do, then might be a time to warp off to one of those safe spots you made earlier, and activate a cloaking device if you have one :)
ISD Tipene > And with that, I think this brings to a close my planned seminar
ISD Tipene > So any questions?
ISD IonCharge > Ikdrib asks if you can upgrade your ship's scanners
ISD Tipene > Your ships onboard scanner is static and can't be improved
ISD Tipene > There are however probes that can be used, to give your ship acurate warp information and full system coverage
ISD Tipene > You can find out more about these in an upcoming seminar or from the career agent for exploration
ISD Tipene > F12, show career agents, exploration if you haven't already done them
ISD Tipene > http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Safespot here's a link to more info about safespots
ISD IonCharge > Ez Ikkala asks about the mapbrowser (F11) being used to help see what you're scanning with directional
ISD Tipene > Yes, I entirley forgot about that, pressing f11 brings up your areas of space, at the bottom is a solar system with a cone set to your scanning angle
ISD Tipene > Of course for fine precision the best bet is to use the box of your ship to line them up
ISD Tipene > ok I think that we're now done. Ion do you want to finish us off?