Dear fellow capsuleers,
Being align is, in my understanding,
So… what with the common advice “stay align when you X” ?! I mean, if I’m mining, or hacking through some can, and I do stay align, after a few seconds I’m out of range and/or break lock.
Is “stay align” just a terrible advice ? What am I missing ?
Thx
stay align is the best advice. Even for mining, carier ratting etc.
Fit a higgs anchor, and your max speed will be very low so you wont fly away from the rock. And if neut comes, you can instawarp.
When ratting or scouting, staying aligned is very easy.
Can hacking should not take too long, but generally the process of learning how to gtfo as quick as you can is very rewarding. But also to pro speed tankers that’s EVE: Sometimes the hunter is better or just lucky.
The Higgs anchor tip above is a good one. For hacking, it is pretty tight. You probably need to start at the maximum range on the opposite side of the can from what you are aligning to, to pull it off. That said, you may be hacking in a ship that aligns really fast anyways. It’s more important to stay aligned if you’re in a ship that takes a while to warp than it is if you’re in a ship that warps really fast.
That said, maybe I’m too incautious, but I generally just stay aligned when I think I am in particular danger. E.g., I will stay aligned if I’m mining in LS or NS only if I see somebody else is in the system, or if I’m in a WH where I don’t know if I’m alone. In HS, there aren’t many situations where I think it is worth the hassle to stay aligned.
How do you ‘stay aligned’ when you rat? You don’t orbit the target or “kite” or anything? You just put it on neutral towards a point in space and shoot anything that enters your weapons’ range or…?
Sorry I don’t understand.
Instead of using ‘orbit’, you could doubleclick in space to manually direct your ship.
That way you could make a circle around a site as well, with more control over the path than if you click the orbit function.
Next, while doubleclicking in space you may see distant objects like structures, asteroid belts, bookmarks, planets. If you doubleclick near one of those you will be ‘aligned’ towards that possible escape direction as long as you fly that direction.
Eventually you will fly out of range of the thing you are fighting or mining, which is when you make a small turn and try to align to another object into your new direction.
Any time an enemy appears, you can instantly warp off to the aligned target (preferably at range) and if your ship isn’t much slower than the ship that was chasing you, you can then warp to safety.
@Gerard_Amatin Thank you for the tips!
So I’m not supposed to orbit my target but instead keep aligning to in-space objects and hopefully stay within my weapons’ range? How does that work with 5 or 6 or 10 npc gunning for me at the same time? Eventually double-clicking in space to maneuver at range will get me in the middle of my enemies and in good range of their weapons. Not saying it wouldn’t happen with the ‘orbit’ order tho, so I guess I’m confused or perplexed.
What I try to do is stay within a certain range and sometimes I have to pursue or follow my targets as they try to fly out of range.
Sometimes there are no space objects to align to that would give me a good course towards engaging my targets. I guess it’s a trial and error thing.
Thanks, Gerard. I think your posts on Reddit are informative and good read.
It will depend on your weapon systems if what I described is useful.
For example, when I’m flying an Algos with blasters and drones, I’ll orbit the biggest targets at 500m as blasters have very little range. This means staying aligned is not really going to work for that setup.
But when I’m flying a drone boat like an Ishtar which only uses drones as damage (which do not care about me being within a certain optimal range) or fly a ship that uses longer range missiles (which do not care much about me being at a certain range either as long as I don’t go outside the travel distance of the missiles), then I can do what I described above and fly aligned at almost all times.
But you can also pick something in between staying aligned all the time and the lazy orbit: pay attention to whoever else is in system with you and if you see someone you don’t trust in local chat or on your d-scan, start aligning.
Picking an optimal path that aligns towards some spot, yet is also in range of your weapons is nice. But it’s even better if you manage to find a path that’s somewhat perpendicular to the direction the NPCs are shooting, so you have maximum transversal speed for them, which reduces the damage you take if your ship is small and fast enough.
I don’t rat often, but did some ratting in a polarized bomber some time ago. Zero defences, no, negative defences (polarized weapons remove all your resistances) on the ship, but with afterburner active flying the ship perpendicular to the lasers meant I took pretty much zero damage.
I tried it again recently, but Guristas aren’t nearly as fun to fight as Blood Raiders. Where it isn’t hard to dodge lasers if you go fast enough, the Guristas missiles keep hitting me. 
(If you fight enemies with missiles or drones they won’t care about your transversal speed.)
Thanks!
Understood! Thanks for the reply. Now everything makes sense.
Well, if I rat in the WH, I indeed align directed to my home station and wait for the rats to come. They are faster anyway.
Easiest way to align quickly: Doubleclick the preferred item in the overview.
OK so when I’m mining an asteroid and I try to align to the gate or station that I want to be my next destination all that happens is my ship moves away from the asteroid to the point where I lose lock.
So how do I maintain lock on the asteroid whilst aligning?
Since the topic of combat and manually piloting was mentioned …
Tracking and spiralling:
Same thing, but some kind soul even added closed captioning:
Like this:
I guess the trick is to turn before you get out of range and double-click another object that would appear in space. Once you have two or three of such align-targets your chances of warping out increase all while staying within range of your objective.
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