Understanding Gate Types

Like many other things in EVE gate types are usually overlooked. Knowing the different types, and how they effect you can help save you from certain demise, or enable you to trap another pilot. There are five types of gates, and each one is different from the other. In this article I'll show you how to differentiate between each, and how they effect your routes.


Gate Types

To start let's go over the different gate types. As mentioned earlier there are five different types of gates, standard, constellation, region, border, and smuggler. Each one has a different job, and a different size.

Gates and their Purpose

Standard Gate: These gates link systems within a constellation
Constellation: Gates that link constellations to other constellations
Region: Gates that link regions to other regions
Border: Gates used on the border between the four empires
Smuggler: Gates found in 0.0 space used to travel long distances through entire regions. (i.e. <->  )

Watching for Gates

There are two ways to find out what type a gate is. One is to look at the Type on your overview. Each gate will list it's type as "<race> <gate type>" (i.e. Caldari Constellation). If you are trying to plan a route, you want to know this before you get to the system. When opening the mini-map with F11 we can take a quick look at the constellation we are in, it's joining constellations, and regions. Doing such we can determine what type of gates will be used on the route.

Gate Attributes

The one thing to remember with the different gates are their size. The reason being that the size determines how much further a pilot will be from the center of the gate after jumping through. Let's take a look at the sizes below.

Standard Gate Size - 2km
Constellation Gate Size - 7.5km
Region Gate Size- 10km
Border Gate Size- 15km
Smuggler Gate Size - 10km

These are probably off by a couple meters, but without exact documentation anywhere for the sizes, it was a matter of testing to obtain these numbers. Needless to say they still serve their purpose. 

After jumping through a gate your ship will end up 12km off of the side of a gate. With the sizes above, adding 12km to that size will give you a general idea of how far your can be from other pilots on the gate. Needless to say with larger gates interdictors, and heavy interdictors cannot put a warp disruption field up that is big enough to effect every ship that comes through the gate, and sometimes none at all. On region gates ships can spawn outside the range of an interdiction bubble if one is placed in the center of the gate. Usually because of this mechanic gate campers will choose a smaller gate to stalk their prey. For the hunted, the bigger gates are your chance for survival.