What is the single most important tip about aiming in Allegiance?

The single most important tip about aiming in Allegiance is that what you see is not what you get.

Ship models are only good for you if you want to identify what ship is where, but they offer extremely poor aim guidance. This article explains why.

Terminology

• A ship's model is the 3D representation of ships as you see them. They are basically eye candy.
• A ship's hitbox is the 3D representation of the space "occupied" by a ship. They are actually what the game checks against to see if your bullets hit or not.

Hitboxes, unlike models, are protected by ASGS.

The problem

Turns out a ship's model and the same ship's hitbox can be horrifyingly different. Here is a gallery of a few "problematic" ships, courtesy of Raingriffin:

• Ships models vs hitboxes
• 

  Rix fighter
  Model in red. Hitbox in gray.

• 

  IC fighter
  Model in purple, hitbox in black.

• 

  Dreg interceptor (side)
  Hitbox in gray, model in yellow.

• 

  Dreg interceptor (front)
  Model in yellow, hitbox in grey.

As these images seem to suggest, a ship's hitbox is a low-polygon convex hull of its model. Wings dramatically increase a ship's hitbox, as pictured.

The problem is made even worse when these ships are shielded. The shield generates another hitbox of its own, even larger than the already huge hitbox -- exactly how large depends by the shield's strength: the weaker, the smaller.

The catch

Fixing this issue is currently low priority for the Community Core team, who would rather focus on getting the umpteenth faction out. There are indeed a few problems with fixing hitboxes:

• The reason you need hitboxes in the first place is that they make the game run faster. The simpler a hitbox is, the faster it is to determine whether you have hit or not. High resolution hitboxes can slow down the game.
• Hitboxes are shared between cores, for some reason. One could argue that changing hitboxes for one core would change hitboxes for all cores, potentially breaking them. However a new set of hitboxes could be deployed for the Community Core.
• The problem about hitboxes has been "balanced" through faction-level modifiers such as "Ship Hull". Fixing hitboxes would require a complete rebalance of these values, a long and complicated process.