There's a major difference between lags caused by connection issues, and jitters caused by high framerate.
Freelancer engine can't handle framerates higher than 180, and even getting close to that number starts causing problems. When a player is suffering from connection issues and has lag, with each registered movement the ship moves away from where it's supposed to be. It's a rather case-by-case basis as well and you can't draw a diagram of how it'd look like, since each weak connection would have its own individual lag pattern.
When people abuse high framerate to cause jitters, though, it doesn't throw their ship off course like lag does, and it pretty much just messes with freelancer's bugged-up targeting system. Ships with framerate jitters generally don't move away from where they're supposed to be, and the main difference with lag is the direction the ship itself is facing is the one effected by jitters, as well as rapid but very short warps when strafing.
Basically, with connection lag, the ship itself is more or less normal and only the movements are warped up, but with framerate jitter the movements are more or less normal and the ship itself is directly effected, which makes hitting jittering ships pretty hard, since no matter how accurate you aim, the confused targeting system can't get a lock on the ship and most of the shots end up going around the hitbox.
People don't seem to understand the difference. Connection lag cannot be avoided by anyone not living in Europe or using a weak connection, but framerate jitter is in each and every case done intentionally, because it cannot be achieved without altering graphic driver settings. Only the latter case is considered cheating and people with actual connection lags should not be concerned or feel threatened about it (Unless it turns out the lags are intentional, which is rather hard to prove and the player has to be a well-known repeat offender for him to get hammered).
