| Author |
=DSA= Hunting |
Captain Caveman
Cadet
Joined: October 12, 2002
Posts: 668
|  Posted: 2003-04-01 06:03
Hunting
Ever been involved in a battle where just as you gain the upper hand the enemy ship e-jumps out? Ever thought to yourself “I wish I could find out where they went so I could finish them off”? Hunting an enemy that has fled from battle can be simple at the easiest of times, or can be impossible at the hardest. This post will demonstrate the basics of how to hunt down a wounded ship.
Hunting an enemy vessel can essentially be split into two parts, tracking the enemy and jumping the enemy.
Tracking the Enemy
When an enemy e-jumps out of battle you can assume 2 things that may seem obvious, but are unbreakable rules. (N.B. This applies to e-jumps only. If the target is stationary when it jumps, you can assume that they have manually jumped out and could be almost any distance from you.)
1) They will have jumped a maximum of 20,000 gu’s away from your current position. I say a maximum, because a damaged jump drive will result in a jump less than 20,000 gu’s. Also, some of the more experienced pilots will end their e-jump early. But you at least have an upper limit for how far away the enemy could be.
2) They will have jumped in a straight line in the direction they were last facing. This sounds obvious, but it can be quite hard to ascertain the exact direction that an enemy was facing in the heat of battle.
So you know now two things about where the enemy could be. The diagram below illustrates one of the problems with tracking an enemy target.
The largest problem associated with tracking an enemy is knowing the direction that they e-jump. It is easy to roughly guess the direction, and at short distances your margin for error is much greater, but as their jump distance increases, so too does the area within which the enemy could be hiding. The red cone in the diagram illustrates this.
So you now know roughly where your enemy has jumped to. What do you do now? You have two choices. You can quickly turn to be facing in the same direction as the enemy, and then e-jump yourself, or you can slow to a standstill, and manually plot your jump.
The advantage to e-jumping yourself, is that you have a chance of finding your enemy very quickly. The problem is that you will damage your own jumpdrive in the process, and if you have failed to locate your enemy, you will have to wait for it to be repaired before you can try to find them again (by which time, an experienced enemy will have already repaired their jumpdrive, and jumped to a safer location).
Manually jumping to your target requires you to slow down, but will not destroy your jumpdrive, allowing you to make multiple jumps much faster.
This is the basic method of tracking an enemy target, but still leaves you a very wide area to cover. Fortunately, there is a little trick to aid you in finding an enemy.
As soon as your target e-jumps out, press F2 to go to the navigation screen. It will automatically be centred on you, and if you zoom out quickly, you will see a “ghost” of the enemy ship jumping out. You will usually be unable to target this ship, but you will at least be able to see where its jump stops before the “ghost” disappears. So you now have an even better idea of where the enemy ship lies. Press ctrl + Left click to manually target that point, and you will have a reference for where the enemy is. You can then manually jump to that point.
However, the chance of you jumping right next to the injured ship is very remote (at extreme scales on the navigation map, tiny mouse movements actually equate to large movements on the real scale). To combat this, hunting is made much easier by working in groups.
The first ship will quickly jump to where they think the enemy is. As soon as the enemy appears on their screen they signal their colleagues, telling them where the enemy is. The easiest method to find an enemy near an ally, is to simply camera (by pressing the c key) your ally when you have them targeted. All enemy contacts near your team mate will then show, allowing you to target them. It should be noted that if an enemy is sighted by the initial hunting ship in mid-jump, they should press the j key to cancel their jump immediately. This will prevent the enemy ship from leaving your sensor range.
Thus, you now have an effective method of tracking an injured enemy ship that has e-jumped out of battle. But what if the enemy ship has decided to accelerate to full speed? If your team mates jump to the injured ship’s initial position, they will probably be far away from the target when they finish their jump.
The solution to this problem is being able to effectively close jump to a moving target.
Jumping the Enemy
Jumping a moving enemy is nothing more than a simple maths problem. Knowing how fast the different types of ship can fly is essential. For example, cruisers have a maximum speed of 25 gu’s/second, whereas dreadnoughts have a maximum speed of 20 gu’s/second. Thus, in ten seconds, a Cruiser will have travelled 250 gu’s and a dreadnought 200 gu’s. This assumes the enemy has accelerated to full power and is flying in a straight line, which is usually the case.
The next stage is to work out how long it will take your ship to get to the enemy’s position. Again, knowledge is the key here. Tachyon Drives will get you to your destination at a speed of 2400 gu’s/second whereas an AM jump drive will get you there at 3000 gu’s/second. Thus a tachyon drive fitted ship will travel 20,000 gu’s in just over 8 seconds, and an AM jump drive fitted ship will cover the same distance in just under seven seconds.
So you now know where your enemy is, how fast they are moving and how long it will take you to get there, so you can work out where they will be when your jump finishes. Remembering that jumps always finish ~256 gu’s short of their intended target, you can now plot an exact jump that will perfectly position you for a single alpha strike on your enemy. I say a single alpha strike, because that is probably all you can hope for, given their speed advantage.
Your first target should always be the rear of an enemy ship. This is where the enemys jump drive and engines are located. By damaging these, you will slow them down and prevent them from jumping out again.
So that’s the basics of hunting an enemy. Locate them, jump them, hit them. Mastering this skill is not easy, and there are many other things that can make hunting nigh on impossible, eg. Scouts, frigates and destroyers jumpdrives recharge very quickly so you need to locate them asap, but at other times, hunting an enemy can be real easy, e.g. if the enemy ship has been beaconed, if they are already in range of an ally, or if they stay still after e-jumping. Again, it comes down to practice and working effectively as a team to isolate and destroy an enemy vessel.
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[ This Message was edited by: Captain Caveman*C* on 2003-04-01 06:04 ]
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Darksworde
Marshal
Pitch Black
Joined: September 06, 2002
Posts: 806
From: The Zoo
| Posted: 2003-04-01 06:16
Way too much spare time bro, way too much. But a good post never the less.
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Darksworde
Marshal
Pitch Black
Joined: September 06, 2002
Posts: 806
From: The Zoo
| Posted: 2003-04-01 06:19
Double Post
[ This Message was edited by: Darksworde*A* on 2003-04-01 07:06 ]
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Lark of Serenity
Grand Admiral
Raven Warriors
Joined: June 02, 2002
Posts: 2516
| Posted: 2003-04-01 10:32
yeah, seriously, i think u need to get out more hon.
nice post tho =P
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Admiral Larky, The Wolf
Don't play with fire, play with Larky.
Raven Division Command - 1st Division
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Binks
1st Rear Admiral
Joined: November 28, 2003
Posts: 469
| Posted: 2003-12-06 19:51
good post, one note..if you are a demo account currently (as I am) (or jsut a midshipman, though it is quite hard to do this as a noob) and you want to help your fleet, fly into the midst of battle, go full speed and beacon all enmy ships, that was hunting parties will have an easy time locating the enemy (and yo uget scouting points). This is best done from the enemy ship's rear, if the enemy ship is stationary, or from right under an enemy ship (though this is dangerous as you are open to their beam weapons)
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