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.
Fly small unblinged inexpensive ships with fast-align and fast warp Corvettes annd Frigates make it so cheap that gankers don’t want to waste their time keep it small and cheap don’t carry much in cargo ad don’t be greedy like new players don’t have luxury to fly big slow ships like Cruiser cause skills do not suport all modules needed to to escape or fight gankers so why buy expensive anyting when it only blows up? If you have 99.99% chance to wreck your car everytime you drive I don’t think you will take it out of garage for a spin.
And “the new pipe” is route to Jita via ganker ville?
Anyway that doesn’t seem like fun when I spent time or money on big ship to see it explode without chance to fight or flee. Most important for me presently is inertial modifyers and hyperspatial rig.
I will be the gazelle until I find a way to be the lion and if I stay a gazelle I will be uncatchable one. Fight of flight I have choose flight.
You will learn and change you ships and tactics just like I did. (I hope anyway )
Now with just that thought, you are a lion cub. CCP sends new players in the wrong direction from the start. Thay want you to spend $$$ on skills/ships you have no idea how to use effectively, and they leave while CCP rakes it in. No wonder the numbers never recovered from the 50k and growing we had. The worst part is I can’t even recommend a good corp for an independent and intelligent player to help.
I will learn or uninstall but I like the game so I will learn. There enough info online for deep targeted learning new things. I am interested in Low-sec so will concentrate efforts in surviving it and thrive.
I did not give attention to what CCP wants me to do. I think is more important to look for info and learn what I want in stead of let myself lead by the nose. I did not even finish the career agents yet as I think it more important to learn the use of scanner with probes and d-scan try to see what/who is undocked and in system. I can learn mining later.
I think many players can lead me to good corporation. Maybe I try EVE University first if they have Low-sec operations or if not it will be an other one.
I also tested in various scenarios. Yes, I got my hands on a retriever. Top secret stuff, don’t tell anyone.
Dscan, even when you only get it at the last second before a beautiful catalyst shows up on grid, is enough to get a retriever (in my case: brick tanked and no pilot skills, 14.25 seconds align, standing perfectly still) into warp before you can get a lock on. In most cases I was not even able to target the retriever.
This seems to be due to a massive slowdown on the last AU before you enter your target destination. It really takes a while until you land on grid and are able to move.
So naturally the question is, what if I don’t use dscan at all? Can I still get away when I start running only when the hostiles are visible on grid?
So, the short answer is: NOPE.
Even when I started fitting the retriever with inertial stabilizers and cut the align time down to 9,65 seconds, I was now able to get a lock on every single time. You could cut down the align time a bit more… but look, this just sucks period, it’s way too little time. Even when perfectly anticipating the ship and hovering my mouse over the warp command, it was never enough to escape the catalyst.
In contrast, even when poorly timed, dscan gives you enough time, even in an unoptimized fit, to warp out from stand-still. So, if you don’t want to align your ship / fleet every 20 seconds, then keeping an eye on local and d-scanning as soon as something fishy is afoot, works well enough.
Of course the illegal use of dscan is 100% NOT CODE compliant and will get you into a lot of trouble. So don’t do it!!
