Mara Rinn
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Posted - 2009.11.19 07:10:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: schoralous
Say you are orbiting (autopilot orbiting) someone without your Afterburner or MWD on. Then you turn the speed mod on. WHY does the ship come to close to a stop, switch direction of the orbit and THEN engage the afterburner or MWD?
Here's my speculation: Because the CCP developers fail at math :)
Not related to afterburners, but similarly related to vector math failure: You'll notice that if your ship is changing vectors from one in a +z quadrant to a -z quadrant, their maths fail causes the ship to turn from 10 degrees to 5 degrees on the x-y plane, then spin quickly from 5 degrees to 360 degrees, and then continue turning to 355 degrees. I suspect this happens because their math was built by someone looking at the x-y plane from the positive z-axis, who then tested their routine by plotting stuff in negative z-space, and never considered the transition from z+ to z-. As a result, angles are measured clockwise in both spaces, when looking at the x-y axis origin from somewhere on the z-axis that is far away from the origin. It's not that simple, since I don't see that problem all the time - I expect the transitions are between quadrants (or octants?) where more than one sign changes (eg: (+x, -y, +z) to (-x, -y, -z)), with the ship turning "left" through 0 degrees.
So too, when you adjust the mass of the ship (I haven't tried it with onlining armour plates yet, so just speculating here), the vector maths fails again and rather than simply trying to "turn left harder" it gets a sign inverted on one axis, and your ship proceeds to turn to the new vector (eg: with -y instead of +y, same angle to x-z), then resume orbiting. At this point the calculations are all using the same "constant" mass, so you have no more weird vector math failure, and the vessel proceeds to orbit as expected (apart from going the wrong direction and thus taking your ship right through the cloud of NPCs you were trying to kite).
That's just my guess. And again, it's speculation.
But at some point in time it would be fun to see if you can achieve the same effect by putting a heavy armour plate online. Might have to try that tonight. If the same thing happens, we have a repeatable bug.
The comes the fun of narrowing down which quadrants cause the "twirling dancing ship" condition.
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