Having now been involved in blobs several times…a question arises…
Following the fleet commander closely can give the benefit of boosts, etc. But, I noticed all the ships were colliding quite a lot. Surely that throws out the turret tracking. I mean, if my ship is literally spinning in space because of such a collision, my targeting is going to be affected.
Is that the case, or not.
I’m not a mechanics wonk, so guessing based on other experiences with the game here.
Mechanics-wise, I believe your ship is simply treated as a sphere. Orientation isn’t significant, and could for instance be handled client-side since I can’t think of any places where it makes a difference to game outcomes. (Can be wrong there, this is just my experience.)
So mechanics results only care about the relative motion of your sphere vs. the target sphere.
A second observation (not EVE related, but ‘gaming experience’) would be that if you see this behavior in a group of noobs, it could well be detrimental. If you see the same behavior happening repeatedly with players who typically know what they’re doing, then you can somewhat safely assume it’s been mathed out before and the benefits outweigh the downsides.
This is where I’ve seen some disagreement in other posts. For example, align and warp. Some claim that the process of warping to a station is quicker if you are aligned in the first place. Others claim ( and I have even seen Youtube videos where it is timed ) that this is a myth and simply not true…and that the ‘sphere’ model means it will take the same length of time no matter how you are aligned.
Alignment includes moving in the direction of the thing you are aligned to. The align button doesn’t just rotate your ship. Aligned, but stationary is not aligned.
So there’s some confusion in a number of posts as to what ‘aligned’ mean. Some people think aligned means “you are pointed at the thing you jump to, but not moving”. As if just swinging your ship around to point at the jump target takes time.
This is likely because the client does swing your ship around to point at jump target, but to the best of my knowledge this doesn’t affect the time to warp.
Being ‘aligned’ actually means moving towards jump target at the speed it takes to initiate warp.
Well, yes, that is exactly what most mean by it when they tell miners to ‘align’ to the relevant station. And that is what actually makes zero difference.
Align as part of warp is another matter, and irrelevant to a miner who wants to be stationary. But here again there is confusion because the rotational part of it is irrelevant but the mechanics of the game mean that you cannot just leave a station with a certain existing velocity and just ‘rotate’. You have to arc the ship into the right alignment.
So it’s really two completely different mechanics being argued over, with the ‘align to’ being the irrelevant one that makes no difference…and existing ship vector ( motion and direction ) being the factor that does make a difference. Hence my original question, as all that bumping clearly affects ship vector.
Okay, well to be more specific then, the relevant motion is your ship vector, calculated as if your ship is a sphere. Thus only the vector of the point source at the center matters.
So if your ship is “spinning” along a vector, the rotational motion isn’t significant. If your ship is constantly bumping/rebounding, then it’s point vector will be changing, but only slightly.
As a crude example, if you’re moving 100m/s east, bump the FC, rebound and start moving 50m/s south (and spinning as a result): then the spin is irrelevant, and the vector has slightly changed angle and speed. Neither of those changes are likely to be large in vector terms.
Your turret angle calculations will be slightly impacted because your angular velocity will have changed slightly. However those calcs don’t really care if you’re going ‘east’ at ‘100’ or ‘south’ at ‘50’ - they only care about the magnitude of the total distance/angle relationship. Which won’t have changed very much from bumping as a blob.
In edge cases, a small movement might take you from being within optimal to just inside falloff, for instance. But in a blob it’s unlikely these small shifts would have noticeable impact.
At least, this is my understanding. Happy to be corrected if wrong.
Exactly this. Ships in Eve have no facing what so ever. They only have a vector of motion. The ship’s facing is rendered on the client according to some rules to make things behave sensibly for the most part, but these same rules can produce nonsensical results.
For instance, a freighter webbed into warp can appear to be slipping sideways because the client will only rotate a dead stopped freighter so fast to keep it from looking more agile than it ought to, but the server does not care about the facing you see, only the direction, and from a dead stop you instantly travel in whatever direction you choose, regardless of facing because you have no facing. Only a direction and speed.
boobs 
oh…
blobs
I’m probably wrong but as I understand it, If say your a miner aligned but at a slow speed, you don’t warp instantly. You have to reach at least 3/4 of warp speed to jump.
I cut align time by hitting ab or mwd to achieve this.
That is correct. Warping requires the target to be traveling 75% of their current maximum speed and within a cone of about 5 degrees of an exact heading for their warp target.
It takes your ship a lot less time to accelerate the first half of that 75% than it does the last, so if you do something like pulse an AB, your ship will speed up at about the same percentage of its maximum speed, but the maximum speed will drop by half when the AB turns off and instantly double your progress. Webs work the same way. Anything that lowers your maximum speed to 133% (ish) of your current speed will put you in warp if you’re moving within that (approximately) 5 degree cone.
You can align at slow speed but still at full (or 75% if you so desire) velocity using this…
Thanks for the conformation that it still works. Very few feelings in game are better than being on the edge of warp when they land on grid only to archive nothing other than a funny conversation and a gf! 
I had always taken the align as being the centre of the ship is aligning from the stern to the bow and the object in which the ship is aligning towards.
When people advice miners to ‘be aligned’, they’re not talking about the facing of the ship. They’re saying that the mining ship should be aligned, in other words, move at 75+% of max velocity in the direction of the object you wish to warp to.
Then, as long as the ship is aligned (which is impractical to hold indefinitely because the mining ship will eventually move out of range of the rocks because of their movement) the pilot can give the warp command to instantly warp to the object that was aligned to.
Aligned is movement. The facing of your ship is irrelevant.
Kinda correct. If the miner is somehow aligned to his warp point and at 75% spd, he will warp off. But good luck with that as you said.
In New Eden this would be solid advise. Thank you for clearing this up for us.
I know where Altara is coming from because I heard a lot of miners trying to ‘align’ just by facing their ship while stationary. This makes it confusing because you have people who know what alignment means are using it one way, and people who believe it’s facing are using it another (wrong) way.
I go out of my way to explain this misconception when I see it because it gets people who misunderstand it killed and it’s an easy mistake to make, especially if you have people in your ear who also don’t know how it actually works.
Well I did think and sorry for sandbagging your reply to Gerard Amatin, I looked at algning and subwarp conditions being two different requirements that are equally important as a pilot could be both aligned and at speed yet there could be another restraint such as a MWD drive active.
Align how I am reading and understanding from Gerard Amatin’s explanation is that the ship is both aligned and at optimum cruising speed ready to instant warp.
You can have MWD active and warp, MWD just increases your maximum velocity thus making it harder to reach it and when it deactivates your maximum velocity drops and if it drops below your current speed your ship will be at maximum speed right away or reach it easier due to the drop because of the MWD deactivation.
But an MWD active will not prevent your warp only not being pointed towards your destination or not being at at least 75% velocity will prevent a warp… unless you bump into some object before entering warp (or get warp disrupted / scrammed / whatever).
Edit: Although a special case is if you got bumped as that movement could prevent warp even if you are pointing towards your destination and at proper speed still the “sideway” movement might mean your vector is still not proper to enter warp.