Have done it several times by total accident. I thought you had to be aligned before you could warp? In any case, can anyone shed some light on the mechanics of this?
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Your ship is made up of two entities, one is a physics controlled entity which is a bubble with a direction, speed, and acceleration vector.
The other entity is the graphics that you see, it is attached to the physics entity but doesnât always matchup exactly, leading to things like drifting Orcas 
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Netan summed it up perfectly. Below is a reddit thread that goes into a bit more detail on the how and why.
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A big part of it is that, when at rest, your ship doesnât actually point in any direction.
Graphically it does, but the physics model doesnât care.
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It would be nice if the physical agility of a ship matches itâs graphical turning speeds a bit better, but thatâs not how it apparently works. This is especially clear with capitals fitted for agility, which can look downright stupid sometimes. (Iâve seen them apparently warp backwards.)
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The real reason is that your shipâs captain has had a little too much aquavit.
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Featureâ˘
The leopard can enter warp backwards =)
As the other said, with good explanations (those f*ckers have trained Internet Research and Advanced Internet Research to V) itâs possible. If you have some spare time and live in a nullsec corporation with a Rorqual player in it, try to use a powerful web on it to decrease the align time of his ship and the drifting Rorqual will be even more impressive than an Orca drift 
Iâm confused so please confirm - the advice I thought I understood says âstay aligned on something when stationary, so you can warp out quicker if neededâ, but this isnât actually the case ?
What about when aligned but moving very slowly ? - e.g. when Iâm on a âsafe-spotâ in a wormhole I start travelling towards a warpable location, so I can get into warp as quickly as possible if someone hostile appears - does this make sense ?
We are talking about the appearance of warping sideways, you mostly only get it when you start to warp from a stationary position, especially after taking a gate. you have an align time aligning to something preemptively eliminates align time. You wont get drift effects if you align to before you warp. Sasha Viderzel mentioned using webs, this would decrease align time and could force a more spectacular drift.
It is the case, here is the thing, your ship needs to reach 75% of its max speed in order to warp, by being âalignedâ youâre already at max speed meaning that as soon as you click warp your ship will leave, if you are sitting stationary your ship first needs to accelerate to reach 75% max speed before it can warp, sitting stationary also makes you a massive target, if youâre moving in the opposite direction your ships physics ball first needs to stop moving in that direction and then start moving in the other direction and again needs to reach 75% of its max speed in the direction of the thing you want to warp to
Meh, the only reason why a Leopard doesnât arrives to the out gate before departing the in gate itâs because of the stupid prejudices about causality and the arrow of timeâŚ
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Not true. Youâre trying to tell us that aligning has no effect on the physics model? I think it doesâŚeven if you stop your ship.
Try it. Take out your heaviest ship. Transport. Orca. Freighter. Titan. Dealerâs choice.
Point it in four cardinal directions, one of those being in alignment with your actual target. Time the four to warp from dead stop to that same target. And report back your findings.
This discussion is the core of the confusion.
The actual advice is that you should âfly alignedâ. However, every miner also gets told to fly aligned ⌠when in fact they mostly do their mining whilst at a dead stop. In that circumstance, does the graphical direction your ship is pointing ie the direction it is aligned in, make a difference or not? The evidence, as already posted here about the physics model, is that it does not.
Thereâs a question I was getting round to asking about that. Some people recommend being stopped but aligned to somewhere warpable when mining, on the basis of a faster exit; whereas others recommend orbiting whatever youâre mining as fast as possible, to make you a harder target to hit if someone hostile does suddenly arrive. Am I correct in thinking that the foregoing discussion suggests that the orbiting tactic is more effective ?
Those serve different functions. Orbiting around a rock will do two things. It will make you harder to bump by the miner bumpers and if someone does try to shoot you then you have at least some transversal or speed to negate some damage.
Aligning to a warpable object will reduce the time needed for you to leave if someone shows up. The amount of time saved is relative to your max speed and how quickly you can get there. If it takes you a long time to reach your max speed then staying alligned but moving slowly isnât really helping much. It might shave 1 or 2 seconds off of your 20 second align time.
Fitting a web to your mining barge and webbing a fleet mate so you guys can stay aligned and moving near the warp threshold but not flying out of range of your asteroid is a good tactic to use.
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Each haves pros and cons. Fast orbit removes you from optimal when the DPS ships land on grid as they warp to the position of the neutral scout; but staying aligned lets you warp out while the DPS enters grid. For a tanky ship, orbiting may make the difference between live and die until CONCORD finishes the DPS, but for a sub-tanked ship and/or several DPS incoming, it is better to GTFO.
Optimal tactic is to align and keep your ship at 2/3 of its top speed, roughly shifting align to different celestials as you move around the target asteroid; you can also use a Higgs anchor module to drastically reduce your speed, but it makes moving around a PITA.
Just to support the argument that visible direction does not mean warp alignmentâŚ
I undocked from one of those downward facing stations in a Marauder with an MJD fitted. I warped to an undock BM, and then waited for the ship to come to a complete stop. Once it did, I activated the MJD to see which direction I would jump.
Expecting to either jump straight down (since that had been the last direction of travel from the undock/warp) or straight ahead (that being the direction my ship was facing). Instead, it jumped straight up toward the station I had just left.
I waited for the ship to stop, and the MJD to cool down, and then I activate it again. This time, it lept in a more-or-less âforwardâ direction from how I had been floating in space. And I ended up somewhat diagonal from the station undock.
So as the others have said⌠what your ship âlooksâ like itâs doing in space is irrelevant. What matters is the motion the database perceives based on the point in space youâre occupying. When you are at Point 1, and then at Point 2, the client renders your ship facing that direction. If you start moving back toward Point 1, the client renders your ship turning around. If you can get up to 75% speed toward Point 1 before the client makes the ship graphic turn around, then you will warp âbackwardsâ or âsidewaysâ.
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