The direction your ship faces is purely cosmetic and is not relevant for gameplay.
If your ship is stopped it is not aligned.
You do not have to align all the time while mining, just when you spot danger. It takes about 100 seconds before you drift out of 20km mining laser range at 200m/s, which is plenty to stay aligned after potential hostiles enter your system until they’re gone again.
And worst case after 90 seconds you pick another object to align to in the opposite direction and now you can drift another 200 seconds uninterrupted while fully aligned.
A retriever does not stop on a dime.. After you hit stop it slowly comes to a stop. As i align I hit stop. Which allows the retriever to come to a slow stop as it aligns. Again a retriever does not just stop. Come to that nor does a venture come to a quick stop.
You are only aligned when at 75% of your max speed. It does not make any difference what direction you are pointed in…even in the exact ‘correct’ direction. If you stop, facing in the right direction, it will take exactly the same length of time to align as it would take if you are facing 180 degrees the wrong way.
It has to be going over 75% of it’s maximum velocity to be aligned.
Being aligned means you can warp within the tick you give the warp command.
That’s imaginary. From a standstill it doesn’t matter which way your ship is facing, it takes your full align time as shown in the fitting window to get into warp.
I’m happy for you you managed to avoid being ganked more than once after aligning your full align time.
Now, if you were aligned you could instantly warp. Give it a try!
Now imagine you have 2+ Miners and they all fit Double Webs instead of tank and web each other (Duel or have Legal Combat activated for your corp). They will make like 10m/s when speed is set to 80%… So you can basically mine until the Roid is empty before you get out of Laser Range… While being 100% aligned all the time to a safespot.
Oh wait, we do Gas Huffing or Gneiss Mining in WHs that way all the time. Imagine the face of the Sabre pilot who warps on grid and seeing the whole mining fleet instawarping before he can even throw a bubble. -_-
But you are missing the main point I mentioned earlier. In my experience of actually doing ganking, the gankers already have the target marked out ( via a scout ) and head for him immediately on entering the system. The whole idea is to show up like the Spanish Inquisition. Thus the miner is still aligning for a large part of this occurring, even if he responds quickly to the arrival of the gankers in the system. And few miners are actually that alert.
I’ve done ganks where we enter the system and immediately fleet warp to the target. There’s no searching for a target…we already have one. The real person to watch out for is not the gankers….its the scout, who is the FC on the watchlist.
Now I don’t mine in HS, but when I do in NS and align the moment a potentially hostile player enters my system I’ll be fully aligned and ready to warp by the time they could have arrived at my spot had they warped directly to it.
It takes a fair bit of time to accelerate and decelerate in warp, more than you seem to account for and enough to get a barge aligned.
Will there be inattentive miners who get caught? Sure!
But if you pay attention, fly in a quiet part of space where new names in local are rare and align the moment you see such a new name you should be able to warp before someone tackles you.
Yeah, thats their problem and thats why they deserve to be ganked. If you cannot leave your spot within 20 seconds once you see the local spike of 5+ unknown chars, you should not expect any other outcome. And you need at least 20 seconds to warp from whatever gate to whatever mining site, even in Catalysts.
I must have been more aware of what was coming than I thought as I was always happy to warp out as others were just landing on grid. A touch to close for me but still happy to get away!
Frankly for me, warping out while they land on grid was somehow satisfying.
