EVE General Discussion

I always thought afterjump position and alignment were random within a 20km from a gate, but it looks like each gate has a fixed point per system to which all ( well..at least all my alts) the incoming ships are aligned to. Am I mistaken, was there a patch, or is it something to do with my client cache?

This is exactly the case, what matters is the speed and direction of movement, if you're ship isn't moving it's effectively not aligned to anything.

As far as the game engine is concerned, your ship is a sphere the size of you signature radius. It accelerates in any direction at the same speed. The direction it is facing does not mean anything.

Visually, yes, your ship will always appear on the other side of a gate jump facing the same direction. Look at the compass surrounding your HUD, notice the caret? That's the direction of a sort of universal "north". That's the direction you face when gate cloaked.

Also, funny fact, when you see a Bowhead, watch what happens when the pilot uses an MWD to cut the align time down to 10 seconds -- Freighter drifting at its best!

Everything you see in EVE is a figment of the client's imagination.

Behind the scenes there are only spheres and velocity vectors. There is no facing direction without velocity.

EVE devs occasionally speak of:
* "balls" = objects in space that can interact (like ships, drones, missiles)
* "bubbles" = the arena where balls can interact (players call this "the grid" though it is 3D).
If you run the EVE logger, you will see lots of message spew about these.

SIgnature = a sphere the effective size of ship, used for hit & damage calculations

The actual model size of a ship is determined by one or more bounding "collision spheres" that approximate the art geometry.

Fanfest 2014 - A Study of Geometry in EVE Online

You know, not being a gate camper I never really put that much thought into it. However it does seem to me that not all stargates are created equal. Regional gates seem to behave differently for example.

Or he went AFK when he saw your search pattern for him was going in the wrong direction and he could slowboat it out in a straight line.

There probably are people that do this, but they're not doing themselves any favors.

As mentioned earlier, after appearing in a system you're sitting completely still and as such are not aligned to anything. As long as you don't double click the screen and start moving early, you'll have the same align time regardless of where you go.

Chopper has it down. Your alignment has absolutely no effect on the time it takes to enter warp when at zero velocity, because at zero velocity, your ship is technically aligned in all directions meaning getting enough velocity is the only remaining requirement to entering warp. At that point, alignment is already achieved even before you decide to give the command to warp.

So, when sitting in gate cloak, warping to something directly in front of the ship is no different that warping to something behind it. It's why, like I pointed out jokingly earlier, that a Bowhead with it's combination of stats and being under the aforementioned circumstances, it will take significantly longer for the visual model to line up to its destination than it would to enter warp, which leads to it appearing to slide sideways momentarily as it begins warp acceleration. If you're moving and decide to warp the other way, though, turning around will take longer depending on the difference of the change of alignment, ship velocity, your inertial modifier, ship hull mass, and so on. If you have any experience with flight sims, think AoA.

Your alignment is basically infinite at no motion and assumes only one direction at a time once in motion.