Over the time I spent quite a lot of time in pyfa. Usually I make about two to three decent fits a day. Be it because I want to know what the capability of the ship is, or someone needs a fit for whatever reason, or just out of boredness. Over time, the understanding of what is actually good has improved (Together with the insanity of the creations). Over time, I also started to use a variety of composite stats that more closely resemble my observations in game and can break down a multitude of things into one. I would like to present you six of them here. I show you what they are supposed to mean, how you calculate them and what is a typical range for them that you can find out there in the wild.
Trading Potential
This one aims to answer a rather simple question. Which one of these ships is going to win the DPS race. The simplest way to calculate this is to just multiply DPS times EHP. You can think of this pretty simply. It doesn’t matter if the enemy had 20% more DPS or 20% more EHP, the result is going to be the same for you. Here is a quick table of common ships in this regard
Depending on how exact you want to be, just looking at this number might not be enough tho. For starters you could take into account the application of both sides. Something definitely worth doing if you want to know about a specific matchup, but not that important in a general sense for a fit.
Another thing you could do is extend this to active tanks, and subtracting the enemies EHP/s from your sides DPS. This leads to better results, but again the Issue is that each value is now matchup specific, and you can’t just quickly compare them.
It might also not be the best thing to maximize this value, sometimes when you are the first guy on grid, having more EHP might be worth it just so that you have enough time until friends can arrive. But in general this is a good number to get you away from the classic pyfa mistake of “Oh look it can do 5000 DPS” while completely ignoring tank, or the other way around.
| Ship | Trading Potential |
| LML Garmur | 700 |
| Rocket Breacher (with Ancils) | 1.5k |
| Osprey Navy Issue (with Ancil) | 10k |
| Cloaky Proteus | 60k |
| Hulltanked Blaster Gnosis | 40k |
| HAM Drake | 75k |
| HML Buffer Nighthawk | 110k |
| HAM Buffer Nighthawk | 150k |
| Hyperion (with 10 Capboosters) | 1350k |
| Blaster Praxis (with 17 Capbooster) | 1050k (Due to worse Resist and no Rep Bonus) |
| Pith Vargur (with 16 Capbooster) | 3000k |
| Gist Vargur (with 16 Capbooster) | 7000k |
Effective Range Control
While it is great that we now determined that you can out-trade the enemy, he might just run away. This is where Effective Range Control comes in. It comes in two flavours: Scrammed and Unscrammed. The Idea is that you figure out how fast an enemy had to go so that he can pull range. For example, with a single 60% web and your ships scrammed speed of 1000 m/s, and enemy had to go at least 2500 m/s to get away from you (2500 m/s * (1 – 60%) = 1000 m/s). If two ships face each other, whatever ships has the higher “effective range control” speed can usually get away (but might still die because it took to long).
If you want to be more accurate, then you can calculate this value dependent on range for both ships, and then compare that way.
| Ship | Effective Range Control (Scrammed) | Effective Range Control (Unscrammed) |
| 10mn Cloaky Tengu (No Web) | 563 m/s | 563 m/s |
| Vedmak | 845 m/s | 6110 m/s |
| Stiletto | 645 m/s | 4400 m/s |
| 2 Web Gnosis | 889 m/s | 6500 m/s |
| 100mn ESS Loki | 6400 m/s | 6400 m/s |
| My Favorite Loki | 1360 m/s | 13600 m/s |
| Hyperion (Web + Full Grapple) | 2000 m/s | 14500 m/s |
Speed over Signature
This one has to be my favorite. Every once in a while you hear someone speaking about “Sigtank” on a ship (and hopefully pulling of some impressive piloting with it). While application formulas are complex and non linear (Missiles use the drf as a variable exponent, Guns even use your ships parameters in the exponent and also depend on your enemies movement, Drones are even weirder) simply dividing Speed over Signature can give you a really good indication of where you are at with your ability to sigtank – if everything goes right and the FC doesn’t ask you to fly straight into a wall of gunfire. Usually I assume a slightly less than linear relationship: Twice the speed or half the signature will result in only slightly more than half the damage taken.
| Ship | Speed over Signature |
| 5mn Interceptor | 60 |
| 5mn Assault Frigate | 30 |
| 5mn Command Destroyer | 20 |
| 5mn T1 Frigate | 10 |
| 1mn T1 Frigate | 25 |
| 5mn Interdictor | 10 |
| 50mn Logi Cruiser | 5 |
| 10mn Logi Cruiser | 12 |
| 50mn Cruiser | 4 |
| 100mn Cruiser | 8 – 15 |
| 50mn Battlecruiser | 1.5 |
| 500mn Battleship | 0.5 |
Resist Multiplier
For once, you don’t have to calculate anything. This one is actually in pyfa! Simply hover over your shield / armor / hull EHP. This one is the ratio in between your HP and EHP. It is mostly useful when you are trying to figure out how much a ship tanks under remote repairs. For example in a Heavy Armor scenario almost any ship on grid should be over a certain threshold, otherwise it is a weak link and will likely die when primaried (and usually enemies have enough time to try almost all ships). For some special cases, different values might be needed anyway. For example a HIC can not be repaired at all times so it’s resist should make up for it, or a long range ECM boat might be able to get away with less as it is an unlikely primary if you hold down most of the enemies.
| Ship | Resist Multiplier (Before Links) |
| Shield Nano Cruiser (No Invuln) | 1.8 |
| Armor Nano Cruiser (Enam + DCU) | 2.3 |
| Shield Nano Cruiser (Invuln + DCU) | 2.5 |
| Old Fleet Muninn (1 Invuln) | 3.5 |
| Drake (2 Invuln) | 3.8 |
| T1 Logi | 3 – 4 |
| T2 Logi | 5 – 6 |
| T2 Armor Command Ship | 7 – 10 |
| T2 Shield Command Ship | 4-6 |
| T1 Battleship with Passive Resists | 4.5 |
| Blingy HA Scorpion | 3.69 |
| T1 Battleship with Active Resist | 6 |
Breaking Tank
This value is the total DPS you can take before your live is cut shorter by not having enough reps. For permarep ships, this is basically just your EHP/s value. It gets more interesting however for Buffer + Ancillary Ships. Here you should think about it in this way: How much DPS can I take so that all my ancillary buffer gets used off before I die? You can calculate it as total EHP (including ancil) divided by the time it takes for the ancil to run out. For armor ships make sure to not count your shield EHP, as this is run down before the ancil runs out and as such can’t buy you time for it.
| Ship | Breaking Tank | |
| Malediction | 250DPS | |
| Nano Retribution | 300DPS | |
| Nano Retribution + ADC | 350DPS | |
| 800mm + MAAR Cruiser (Vedmak) | 500 DPS | |
| 800mm + MAAR + ADC Cruiser (Deimos, Zealot) | 800 DPS | |
| XLASB + LSE Cruiser (Osprey Navy) | 800 DPS | |
| MAAR Brutix Navy | 1050 DPS | |
| MAAR Astarte | 1500 DPS | |
| XLASB Cyclone | 1600 DPS | |
| XLASB Sleipnir | 2200 DPS | |
| LAAR Nano Battleship (Typhoon, Leshak) | 1350 DPS | |
| XLASB Barghest | 2300 DPS |
I feel like specifically this stat is very dependent on how exactly you fit ships, so ideally you check your own ships to get numbers that are more specific. What you should clearly see here however is that ancillary shield ships tend to be significantly better in getting all their charges of than their ancillary armor counterparts.
Distance after Ten
This one is more of a kitey thing. Often people boast about their ship reaching x or y speed and forget to look at their agility. A good measurement here is how much you can move from a standstill within 10 seconds. You could Imagine an enemy warping to you from somewhere else or something similar, and you have to react to it and get out of scram range. You can find this in pyfa’s graphs (Under the Mobility Section find the Distance option),
| Ship | Distance after Ten |
| Stiletto | 35 km |
| Nano Astero | 30 km |
| Tackle Jaguar | 25 km |
| Sabre | 20 km |
| Vedmak | 15 km |
| Orthrus | 15 km |
| Sleipnir | 8 km |
| 100mn Loki | 5 – 7 km |
| 2x Nano Nightmare (Snaked) | 5 km |
| Hyperion | 3.5 km |
Final thoughts
Combining these concepts can result in a really powerful understanding of the game. For example, any ship in the game has a (base) resist multiplier of at least 1.5. Polarized guns take that advantage away for a DPS multiplication by 1.2. You can directly see that in a buffer vs buffer scenario polarizing your ship is never a good option. The enemy has to active tank at least 60% of your unpolarized damage so that your trade potential is the same. (0.4 * 1.5 = 0.6 * 1).
Another easy example is trading potential on hulltanked ships. Fitting a T2 damage module will give 22.9% extra DPS (with stacking penalties for further ones) while fitting a T2 Bulkhead will give you a 25% boost to Hull HP (which is not stacking penalized). You can see fairly quickly that getting more Bulkheads is better for Trading Potential. So the best bait ship is also the best solo ship and there is mathematically no reason for diversity (CCPlease).
You can see that it is very quick to make arguments about things, or compare different fits with these values, and that is really their main use. Not being precise to the last decimal, but decent ballpark estimates for what to primary, if you can win the 1v1, if they will track you, if you have range control and so forth. Out of all these, which stat is your favourite? And what stupid fit have you come up with that maximizes one of these? I have added some of my funny fits in there too. Others I had to leave out – they would simply skew the picture to much.
2 Comments
Why is the “Distance after Ten” not calculated for bastioned Marauders ??
Because I thought that would be an easy thing to figure out on your own.