Guide to Jamming

Written by Ryysa

Published in PDF format by [aaeo].net

www.allabouteveonline.net
Guide to Jamming
Wednesday, 31 May 2006
Table of contents:

1. How the jamming works after EW patch.

2. Optimal, falloff, wtf?
3. Skills affecting jammers.
4. Personal recommendations.
5. Probability theory for those who care.
6. Plain ship setups.

Part 1:
When before the EW patch, you only had to stack up enough jammers to go over
someone's sensor strength, now it's different... there is a percentage chance of
jamming now.
Let's say we have a blackbird with a multispectral jammer (from now one referred to
as "Multis"), with a jamming strength of 4 (assume the person has no skills trained
whatsoever). He goes up against a ferox (which has a sensor gravimetric sensor
strength of 19), his chance to jam the ferox with that one jammer is 4/19 * 100% =
21,1 %
So the formula for calculating the jamming percentage is.

Now let's see what happens if this same ferox gets jammed by a non-named T1
gravimetric jammer (Spatial Destabilizer I) by a person who has no skills to boost the
jammer. This jammer would have a jamming strength of 6. 6/19 * 100% = 31.6%
This is conciderably better, however let's see what happens if we jam someone with
the wrong racial jammer. T1 non-named Racial jammers (from now on referred to as
"Racials") have a jamming strength of 2 towards all sensors, except towards the race's
sensors they were designed to jam.
Wrong racial jammer calculation on the ferox:
2/19 * 100% = 10.5%
Conclusion: Racials are more effective, but you must know what you are up against,
or just fit racials of every kind. I will cover this more later on in the skills section.

Part 2:
As you probably noticed, jammers now also have an optimal range and a falloff range
(both of which can be increased by skills, but more to that later on).
The falloff works pretty much the same as the falloff of the guns.
For example: Let's say you have an optimal range of 100km and a falloff range of
30km on your jammer. This means that at a range of 130km your jammer will only hit
50% of the time. At 160+ km it will not hit at all....
Here is a formula to calculate jamming chance, taking in account the optimal and the
falloff range.
Taking the previous formula into account:

Note that this formula ONLY applies if the target is within the falloff range, if it's
inside optimal range, then you can use the first formula, and if it's outside
optimal+falloff, the chance is automatically 0. (Yes, I know I could have abs() and
sgn() in that formula, but why make things too complicated...)
This formula applied to a Ferox with a sensor strength of 19, which is 130km from the
jammer, being jammed with a multi, which has an optimal range of 100km, a falloff
range of 30km and a jamming strength of 4 shows the following:

Meaning it's only a chance of 10.52% to jam the ferox at that range...

Thx to Hoshi for a slight correction :)

Part 3:
There are multiple skills that affect jamming, i will try list the most obvious ones of
them.

1. Signal Dispersion, rank 5, 5% bonus to all ECM jammer strength per skill
level.
2. Long Distance Jamming, rank 4, 10% bonus to optimal range of ECM,
Remote Sensor Dampers, Tracking Disruptors and Target Painters per skill
level.
3. Electronic Warfare, rank 2, 5% less capacitor need for ECM systems per skill
level.
4. Frequency Modulation, rank 3, 10% bonus to falloff for ECM, Remote Sensor
Dampeners, Tracking Disruptors and Target Painters per skill level.

There are also various bonuses of different ships, especially the Scorpion, but also the
blackbird and the griffin.

1. Griffin: 20% bonus to Electronic Warfare optimal range per level. (no, it
doesn't affect propulsion jammers.)
2. Blackbird: -5% bonus to ECM Target Jammer capacitor need and 20% bonus
to ECM Target Jammer optimal range per skill level.
3. Scorpion: 5% bonus to ECM Target Jammer strength and 20% bonus to ECM
Target Jammer optimal range per level.

Examples:

1. A 'vanilla' blackbird with the person not having signal dispersion skill,
jamming a ferox with a T1 non-named multi inside optimal range: 4/19 *
100% = 21.1% jamming chance.
2. A Scorpion pilot with lvl4 caldari battleship, and lvl4 signal dispersion,
jamming a ferox with a T2 Spatial Destabilizer racial jammer:
10.368/19 * 100% = 54.6% jamming chance

Draw your own conclusions.

Part 4.

I've been flying griffins, blackbirds and a scorp for a while now...
And generally I'd recommend using racial jammers over multispectrals.... and of
course T2 if you can afford them (they are a must though).
Racials use less cap and have a longer range than multis. Which is a very big
advantage.
Also check market prices, some people sell their 7.2 named racials cheaper than T2
versions of these, which also have 7.2 strength but eat more cap...
The only ship I would use multis on, is a scorp, since it has enough cap to run them,
and with decent skills they are actually quite useful...

Okay now because every jammer actually has a fixed chance to jam something,
NEVER put more than one jammer at a target cycling... I'll try to explain based on an
example...
Let's say we are jamming 3 cruisers with multispectral jammers (to keep it simple)...
And let's also say we're using a scorp with 5 jammers.
Now the first thing we would do, is obviously lock all targets, and then put one
jammer on each of them...
Assuming we jammed 2 out of 3 targets, we now use the 2 unused jammers to help
the 3 used ones (keeping the 3 cycling all the time, one on each cruiser).
So we add a jammer onto the unjammed ship, let's say it's lucky and still doesn't get
jammed, so we add another one...
As soon as it gets jammed, we take off everything but one jammer off the ship we just
used 3 for... it's because the jammers will stay on anyway, and next cycle, the 1
jammer that is on it, might be enough, and you might need the rest to help jamming
on another cruiser.
I'll make a fraps video at one point of this...

The only difference with racials is that if you have a rack of different ones (i'd use
some racials and some multis as backups), you just stick 1 racial on each ship of the
right race... and help with the multis.

Part 5 (the nerd part, skip if u wish):

From the math probability theory...

If we have an experiment that can only have two outcomes (a positive, and a negative
one) while the chance of the outcomes is always fixed, Bernoulli's formula applies.
Example: What is the chance to jam a ferox with 5 T1 multispectral jammers on a
blackbird without any additional skills?
Individual chance per jammer: 4/19 * 100% = 21.05%
The total jamming chance (let's use 21% for convenience):
1 Jammer of 5 hits: 5C1 * 0.21^1 * 0.79^4 = 0.41
2 Jammers of 5 hit: 5C2 * 0.21^2 * 0.79^3 = 0.22
3 Jammers of 5 hit: 5C3 * 0.21^3 * 0.79^2 = 0.06
4 Jammers of 5 hit: 5C4 * 0.21^4 * 0.79^1 = 0.01
5 Jammers of 5 hit: 5C5 * 0.21^5 * 0.79^0 = insignificant
Which would make a total of 70%, as we are interested in options where from 1 of 5
to 5 of 5 jammers hit.
Of course there is a way to do this much easier, but it's less illustrated...
0 Jammers of 5 hit: 5C0 * 0.21^0 * 0.79^5 = 0.31
Opposite chance, 1-0.31 = 0.69, which is 69% and is approximately the same as 70%,
previously 70% was achieved due to a lot of rounding upwards
I'd say that 30% chance of not being jammed with 5 multis is pretty good =p

Part 6 (Ship Setups! YES!):

Jamming Blackbird setup:
High: whatever you want
Mid: Sensor booster T2, 4 Racial T2, Multispectral T2
Low: Cap relays? 1600mm plate? RCU?.

Explanation: I recommend warping this thing in at range and a bit after all other ships
are in, as it can go boom really fast if a battleship decides to give it a nudge with guns.

Tackling/Jamming Blackbird setup:

High: whatever u want (nosf?)
Mid: 4x Multispectrals / 3x multispectrals + AB, Sensor booster, 20km scrambler.
Low: cap relay? rcu? 1600mm plate?

Any other ship setups are welcome :)

For a griffin, I can't really give you anything, since not a lot of people fly it, and it's
really fragile...
The only thing I see it doing is:

High: whatever
Mid: AB/MWD, 20km scram, sensor booster, 1x multispectral.
Low: cap relay

Explanation: can't run this for a long time, but can lock quite fast and catch stuff at
gates... and then jam them if it gets lucky... so yeah.... get something for your luck :)

P.S. fl0pski is a nub :D

Ryysa