We have all seen the damage progress meter that’s displayed a target ship or POS, but I can tell you that if you’re looking at a targeted POS, you have much more time to study it. Sometimes you have to gauge how much shield or armor remains on a target, so here’s how you can estimate that pretty quickly.
The Targeting Icon
First, the meter itself will appear around any targeted item, such as a ship. Here you can see some poor slob taking damage to shields and a little bit of armor. In this example, if the FC asks you how much shield is left on that target – what would be your guess? (* Don’t peek, the answer is below).
The first step in estimating their damage is to look at the hash marks on the frame around the target – not the damage progress meter itself. Depending on the brightness of the sky, the target frame is sometimes easier or more difficult to see. Here’s the target frame in false color:
The Targeting Frame
Notice how there are two vertical ticks surrounding the middle of the X axis on the target frame. Using the 20:20 vision of your mind’s eye, put an imaginary line right smack between these tick marks. This is the 50% spot. Notice that in this enlarged view, the damage meter no longer appears to provide a distinct boundary between red and grey. This is probably antialiasing (that’s a guess) and may not reflect real damage done to the target. If anyone has information about this, it might be helpful.
The 50% Point - Click to embiggen
Now, if your vision is good, you’ll probably notice that the 50% line in this image isn’t exactly on center. That has to do with the size of the damage meter itself. It turns out that the damage meter is 64 pixels (px) wide – including the 1px borders on both ends. Obviously, half of 64 is 32, so putting the imaginary 50% line 32px from the left edge should suffice, right? Well, no – actually, the exact 50% spot is on the border between the 31st and 32nd pixel. We can’t draw it any thinner in this image, but it’s actually on the left edge of the blue line.
The 25% and 75% Points - Click to embiggen
Since we know that the total size of the damage meter is 64px, we can also use the clunky 1px precision to place imaginary lines at the 25% and 75% spots by dividing the image into equal bits 16px wide.
Zooming in even closer (and adding 1px gridlines) you can see some additional details. If you want to determine the amount of damage shown, you really just need to know what the two tick marks around the 50% spot indicate. If you count pixels, you’ll see that they’re between 6 and 7 px from the center line. Since the total width is 64px, we know that we could divide the meter into 10 equal parts if we could split it into 6.4 pixel divisions. We don’t need to go that far, however, since that information is enough to tell us that each of those tick marks are almost exactly 10% above and below the 50% spot.
In other words, those two ticks indicate the 40% and 60% spots on the damage meter. Once you know that, you can guesstimate the amount of shield or armor remaining on a target.
More Detail - Click to embiggen
Also – given the size of the meter (64px) we can estimate that each pixel accounts for (64/100) or about 1.6% of the total available hit points on the target. If that target is a frigate, then you may be talking about 30 hitpoints per pixel. On the other hand, if it’s a Caldari Large POS – you’re looking at about 750,000 hitpoints per pixel on the meter.
* A: In this example, the shields are 2px above the 60% mark – which means there are approximately 63% shields remaining.
Gears of War 2 has been out for a few months, and one of the game modes that I’ve been having the most fun with is Hoard. My friends and I like playing co-op, and this is Epic’s take on what’s known in other games as Defend. 
