More than 1000 years in the future - why do we have a canopy?

Nonya

Banned
Yo dawg, I heard you like monitors so you'll play a game on your monitor where you'll see through monitors :D
I like you. Have some rep.

Direct visual will always be the preferred method due to that not needing a backup.
 
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I would like to point out that even the most sophisticated of sensors/cameras can be fooled with relatively cheap tricks and ruses. Or, as a certain Commander - from a universe that contained Effects which were Massive in scale - once said, "You know we're just hidden from their sensors, right? They could still look out a window and see us".
 
Cuz.... technology can fail. Your camera could be jammed. If you were encased in a ball of steel with camera images projected, you'd suddenly be staring at steel walls and not "around you".

Canopies and windows you can always look out of :)
 
The future is never what we imagine. We all should have been driving flying cars for the past 15 years. Instead, we are just getting into car that run completely on battery. The first battery powered car was in 1837.
Many reasons can be concocted as to why we have canopies, let just say its for style. Otherwise every ship would be a remotely controled disc or sphere of varying sizes.
 
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I would like to point out that even the most sophisticated of sensors/cameras can be fooled with relatively cheap tricks and ruses. Or, as a certain Commander - from a universe that contained Effects which were Massive in scale - once said, "You know we're just hidden from their sensors, right? They could still look out a window and see us".

The point was that they couldn't mask themselves visually, only on infrared. And the Geth don't have organic eyes, they'd be looking out the window and seeing the Normandy with cameras of some sort.
 
Also humans like to see outside, which is why there are windows for passengers on airliners - there's no sound structural reason for them, but humans aren't overly keen on being strapped into an enclosed tube which they can't see out of while they rocket through the atmosphere via the safest form of transportation on the planet - go figure.

I keep hearing that flight is the safest form of travel. But I also keep hearing about planes that crash, or going missing. When's the last time you heard about a train going missing? I also don't as often hear about commercial passenger ships sinking. I wonder why that is.


ON TOPIC, I was thinking about this just the other day. And about why our ships aren't just rectangular solids with turrets at the verticies. No matter where you are around the ship you would have at least 4 barrels in your face. Would that be boring as hell? Sure. But it'd be fantastically practical.

Furthermore, we're already learning how to project 3D images on a 2D screen, in fact I've got a small example on my desk right now in sleep mode because I hate Victory Road. I imagine that a guarded internal cockpit would either have the pilot wearing an Oculus Rift style headset, or be sitting in a sphere of video projection that gives him view of everything surrounding the ship, far surpassing the view we have even in the Asp with its incredibly open cockpit.

1000 years is over ten human life times, the truth of the matter is (assuming we don't end ourselves, or the universe doesn't end us), we can't even begin to accurately imagine how far technology will have progressed in that time. Even over my lifetime things have changed so very much. Stuff that was far-future science fiction when I was young is stuff I can hold in my hands now!

EDIT: I crit that wall of text for over 9000 damage... or a couple line breaks. Either way.
 
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The first mercury capsule built (I think it was Mercury) did not have a view port (window) but the astronauts insisted on one being there.

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I keep hearing that flight is the safest form of travel. But I also keep hearing about planes that crash, or going missing. When's the last time you heard about a train going missing? I also don't as often hear about commercial passenger ships sinking. I wonder why that is.

But you do hear about train crashes and you do hear about ships sinking with loss of life. For miles travelled - commercial aviation is the safest form of transport.
 
It looks cool and understandable. That's the real reason, right?

Now, since ED started development technology has jumped to the extent that it's readily understandable to have an Oculus Rift style headset and an embedded cockpit.

At some point it'll become readily understandable to have AI controlled craft, or something even more outlandish. Not sure how cool it will look though.
 
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I think that the need for the canopy is to (amongst other things) allow players to see into the distance without needing to rely on technology, which could fail, or not produce a good enough image to allow us to believe we are looking out directly. Mankind is, by nature, an exploratory beast (as well as a lot of other things), and needs to be able to look out there. Try travelling in the back of a van with no view out. Even if the journey is smooth, and you have something to occupy your mind, you will not enjoy the journey (not many people will). Now add an external view, and the journey will be much better. I know I like to look out of my windows ever so often, even if I have things I need to get on with.
 
There's a lot of things not realistic. Weapons would automatically target and combat would be entirely computer controlled, with weapons with range 100s or 1000s of kilometres. Even 2015 air combat is fire and forget missiles from so far away they're over the horizon. WW1 combat is far more exciting, so you've got to accept a certain steam punk approach to things.
 
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so why a cockpit and canopy??

So whilst waiting to Hyper Jump to the next system, some poor chap can come over and wash your windshield for a buck!

Got to keep those poor lost souls who have lost their ships and no insurance making money somehow, window washers sounds about right as we leave the stations.....hehe.
 
So what the OP wants is to sit and watch the game inside an opaque room through a virtual monitor (where you have to move an external camera to change the view on the virtual monitor)???

How would that be better to play than what we have now (in any way at all)?
 
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never said anyhting about moving the external cameras. But maybe u could change the viewscren to a a number of different views, increase magnification etc.
 
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To Owner of this text: Do yo have creative ideas? SCI FI or Epic FI? Talking about the realism of 1000 years in the future? We have no idea what will happen in 10 years on the theme of technological development. Try to develop one idea, concept art, concept thought on the subject of SCI FI and cover all possible realism in the same.

I want to say. The developers are not thinking about that kind of realism, they worked on the project.
Number two. I got used to the windshield (canopy) :)

Long ago I protested. Why the spirits respond to bleedeng in Diablo 3. They bleed :) It would be very dangerous to react to certain types of attacks. So to be totally immune to physical blow, and be subject to magical.
 
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Slopey

Volunteer Moderator
I keep hearing that flight is the safest form of travel. But I also keep hearing about planes that crash, or going missing. When's the last time you heard about a train going missing? I also don't as often hear about commercial passenger ships sinking. I wonder why that is.

Trains don't go missing per se, because they're on fixed routes by definition (i.e. tracks). But they do crash.

Many ships do go missing but they tend to be small vessels - large passenger ships do sink - the Costa Concordia for example, and if you live in the UK you can't possibly have failed to note the plight of migrants into the EU, where around 1000 are drowning per week in the Med. (pax cruise ships spend quite a while in costal waters (so the pax can see something), under radar coverage and tend to have satellite comms/telemetry, so again, trick to vanish).

Aircraft, by virtue of the fact that they can fly mostly anywhere and that radar coverage is not universal, do 'vanish' - except they don't really vanish, they crash and are either somewhere inhostpitable/remote, are destroyed into many many little pieces, or end up in the ocean which is a vast area with difficult depth and pressure issues, which mankind still has not mapped more than a small proportion.

So it's not really surprising that aircraft go missing but trains and large passenger ships don't.

There is also an order of magnitude more flights than train or ship journeys, hence it's statistically safer. But a plane crash makes great headlines in ways train derailments in other countries don't...

In 2016, the cruise industry estimates it'll carry 22.9 million passengers. Air passengers for the same year are estimated at 3.6 BILLION.... If you sink one ship and loose 400 people, to have the same level of deaths per head in air travel you'd have to crash 115 Airbus A380s...
 
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[video=youtube;wIuSAsg9YmM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIuSAsg9YmM[/video]

This sort of cockpit would make more sense.

But then, Elite's whole setting is rather archaic and contradictory. Given how far into the future the game is set, and given how far mankind has spread, along with the presence of FTL technology... it's ridiculous to suggest that 99% of space traffic would be tiny, one-man ships with machineguns and conventional cockpits. Now, if the Elite universe was one of almost post-apocalyptic decay, the odd technological limitations would make more sense; that mankind had forgotten things, like in Warhammer 40k. But that isn't the case. This is supposed to be mankind at a time of great wealth and power.

In the end though, we just have to accept; Elite's lore was never going to be its strength, and the details of its world were always going to succumb to the gameplay.
 
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