Nikolai Lachance
Happy Wheels Logistics
149
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Posted - 2015.03.22 05:36:11 -
[1] - Quote
It is correct that the direction your ship model appears to be facing is purely cosmetic. The direction your ship's apparent thrusters are facing is ultimately meaningless. Your ship can apply a thrust force in any direction at a moment's notice.
To enter warp, the component of your ship's velocity that is moving directly toward your warp destination must be at least 75% of your ship's current maximum speed, and your velocity vector must point within about 8.1 degrees of that direction (it is likely to be the arccosine of 0.99).
I developed graphs that show what your align time would be based on the angle your current velocity vector is away from your destination, and what percentage of your max speed that you're moving. The graphs can be viewed here: http://imgur.com/a/jkRCq
The align time multiplier is what you multiply by your ship's mass in kilotons and then by your ship's inertia modifier to get actual align time in seconds.
The graphs show how align time is the same regardless of what direction you're pointing if you have 0 speed. It also shows that your worst case align when moving at 100% speed is if you're moving 98.1 degrees relative to your destination, with moving directly away from it being a very close second. The source of that local minimum between the two is where it starts to take longer to accelerate to 75% of your max toward the destination than it does to turn your ship within 8.1 degrees of it.
The second graph shows that, in some cases, it can actually make your align take longer if you shut off your afterburner just as you start to align to a target. Generally prop mods make you less agile while online due to their mass increase, thus making them bad for your align times. However, having a lot of excess speed as a result of turning one off is also bad for alignment, as it can take much longer to turn toward the destination, or move your speed where it needs to be. This effect is much more pronounced for MWDs since they add so much more speed. Generally speaking, if you're flying with an MWD on and you need to warp to something right now, you're better off leaving it on while you align. |