Turrets (beams, ballistics and coil guns) roll to hit every cycle. Two things decide the odds: tracking, whether the gun can turn fast enough to follow the target across your sights, and range, how far the target is beyond the gun's optimal range. Seekers are different: they always hit in range, but do less damage to small, fast ships.
Read your hit chance
- Lock a target. Show mePlay to try this
- Under the distance on its card you see your odds right now, for example Hit 12% · tracking. The word after the dot says what holds them down.
- Open the combat log. Every miss says why: misses — too fast to track or misses — out of range. A plain misses at good odds is just bad luck.
Too fast to track
What counts is angular velocity: how fast the target sweeps across your view. A frigate circling you at 1 km at full speed sweeps faster than a cruiser's guns can turn. The same frigate flying straight at you, or 5 km out, is easy to follow. Bigger targets are easier to hit, too.
- Keep your distance. Keep at range or orbit a few kilometres out. Don't ram it with Approach: the closer it circles, the faster it crosses your sights.
- Fly in a line with it. A ship flying straight at you or straight away hardly moves across your sights at all.
- Slow it down. A Ostrava Anchor Stasis Tether halves its speed within 10 km, which roughly doubles your odds against a frigate. Starter cruisers carry one.
- Use smaller guns for small ships. Small turrets track far faster than medium ones. A frigate fit is the cheap answer to frigates.
Out of range
Past the gun's optimal range, the odds fall through falloff. At optimal plus one falloff you hit about half your shots, and at twice the falloff hardly any. Close in, or load a longer-range charge; charges are under Fitting.