If you have a communication dish on a non-central point of a rotating ship....

[Kerbface]

Will it still be possible to track it? I don't know much about how communication with ships works, but I wanted to know, does it have to be a moving in more or less a straight line? I was just thinking if it does that might make bola ships not practical.

[Nibb31]

Bola ships aren't practical for many reasons, but a dish moving in a 20m wide circular rotation at millions of kilometers shouldn't make much of a difference.

[Jokurr]

You are already communicating with a ship in orbit moving at thousands of kilometers per hour relative to your tracking station. Throwing in a small rotational velocity to that is negligable.

[architeuthis]

You can track it but the transmission bit rate from the satellite will suffer as the antenna will only be pointing at the receiving station some of the time. Since many satellites are spin-stabilized the antenna gain must be increased by being either mechanically or electronically 'despun' (by rotating the antenna in the opposite direction of the satellite's spin in the case of of the first, or by phasing through a number of fixed radially mounted antennas in the case of the second). As you can imagine there are drawbacks to each of these approaches, such as mechanical reliability and accumulation of angular momentum through bearing friction in the case of mechanical despin and transmission discontinuities in the case of the electronic 'despin'. Either way the antenna's effective orientation will remain fixed with respect to Earth:)

[Kerbface]

So if it was rotating, it would only have a brief moment when it was facing the right direction to send the signal back. What about recieving signal, does that require as precise alignment?