Stars are too small

I do play in VR...and they don't feel like the massive bodies they are. They feel no bigger than the planets.

They can't feel bigger than the planets. Most planets are already too big for your mind to comprehend, too big to fit into your everyday experience of reality. As such you'll never be able to really feel the difference in size between, say, Earth and the Sun: they're both incommensurably big.
You can certainly fit the concept of a few kilometers in your mind: that's about as far as the horizon goes, at which distance you can still just about make out familiar objects and terrain features. It's a big distance, but you can comprehend it thanks to your everyday experience of it. From there, your working memory allows you to duplicate and juxtapose that distance a few times end-to-end and get a good feeling for what a few dozen kilometers mean as well. But beyond that? You can probably barely get an intuitive understanding of what a hundred kilometers is, you have to start using trick with your working memory. You have to start thinking in steps, you have to group those few items your short term memory can work with into bigger, less accurate sets. And at that point, you are no longer feeling things, you are thinking them.

Just think of what a thousand kilometers is. You can certainly do some maths to figure out how it relates to everyday life figures but that wont help much: your daily commute may be 20 kilometers, and a thousand kilometers is 50 times that. You can probably get a good feel of how much more of a bore your daily commute would be if it were 5 times longer, but beyond that?
I'm sure we've also all watched those videos on the scale of the universe and how various stars compare in size. The first few seconds usually involve Earth sitting right next to the sun: can you actually get an accurate idea of how big the sun is? Or is it just 'big'?

And here's how it relates to the game: the slowest speed in supercruise is 30km/s. I've established we can probably have a relatively accurate grasp of what 30km is, and we obviously have a pretty good intuitive feel for what a second is. From there, 30km/s is a concept you can wrap your head around, but only just barely. The earth's diameter is ~13,000km, if you were to fly by the planet at that speed at about 1000 or 2000km altitude (I don't have the game open right now but I'd think that is approximately the height of the exclusion zone for an earth-sized planet), it would take entire minutes to notice signifcant position changes. Do you think you can get a good feeling for your actual speed and the scale of the planet then? Anybody who's been in a plane flying above a few kilometers and had the feeling the plane was crawling through the air when it was instead going between 300 and 900km/h (speeds which are several orders of magnitude more relatable for anybody who has ever driven on the highway than 30km/s) knows the answer. The further away you are, the faster you need to go to notice any parallax effect.

Now you could think, maybe Frontier should let us move much closer to the surface of stars, to be able to appreciate their scale better, and that's true and would be great, and I'd love being able to fly (painfully slow) through those mass ejection columns. But you would still only get the idea that they are "big", I don't think you would get the feeling of how big (most) stars are compared to planets: 30km/s is just not a feasible speed for flying down to the surface of a star, it's not even feasible for flying down to the surface of a gas giant, and going any faster simply ruins any sense of scale.
 
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Yep.

No different than walking around a beach ball. Your brain isn't fooled...it knows the ball is small.

I've asked for a OVERLAY ...have a Wire-frame model (displayed on the HUD) of the Sol/Sun/Earth/Jupiter and have it offset to the planet/star you are near. This would quickly show you how large (or small) the object is!
 
You should visit more stars. Many of them are a lot bigger than you might think. If you can, play in VR, it helps with the sense of scale.
 
That tiny dark spot over there is my Vulture, I'm at 2.70Ls from that star, it has a solar radius of 0.6996...

QEAw4LS.png


So, where is that star (which has a size of a bit over the half of Sol) small? :D
 
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Not sure about the scale, but the brightness in the visible spectrum feels way off.

You can pretend something amazing is happening with the tinted transparisteel (?) but most of the canopys are clear... so...

+1 to the pile of gameplay over realism.
 
Totally agree. The 'on-screen' size is roughly the same for a big star as a small star when you get 'close' to them, so they don't even really feel different sizes (other than the time it takes to fly round one). You don't feel dwarfed by them at all, planets feel bigger as you come in to land on them.

Can't agree with that, I can fuel scoop around a large star at full throttle and have no trouble maintaining a good position, try that around a small star and in my T6 I am soon getting pushed out because I simple can't turn fast enough. It may feel that way, but it certainly isn't correct, our senses are easily fooled.
 
I'm a huge Elite fan, but I've come to feel that Stars (aka Suns) in the game are too small.

Perspective; we're not overly close when scooping. Also a star that presents a scale you want, would not allow you to escape at all at the speeds we scoop at; and in fact would likely just rip our ships apart if we hit a shift in gravity (gravity isn't overly consistent across the surface of a star, iirc). So, one-way trip. Assuming we could actually pull away from the star at a much closer/ larger scale, how good are you with several hours, to days, in game, just escaping the gravity of one?

It's a game; scale will always be an illusion and serve that where needed. It can't be the other way around, because we're not all sitting in Carl Sagan's ship of the imagination that has no issue dealing with massive gravity for the purposes of presenting that. This is the thing. A game, even presenting a simulation, has to compromise. This, is one of those times, where "real" isn't actually "practical".
 
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Lestat

Banned
If they made them bigger, it would completely mess up the scale in ED. All that is required is a toggle to override the exclusion zone so cmdrs can get closer, I doubt they want to do that for a number of reasons.
Well the scale right now is the visual of a star look to much the same size of all the other stars. It doesn't matter if it large or small. They look to be the same size. The only way you can get an idea of a star size is System map.

That why my idea works out. Players get somewhat the scale of a star. It doesn't have to Super close to the stars. Just that visual feel of different star sizes. Instead, one size fits all that we currently have now.
 
Well the scale right now is the visual of a star look to much the same size of all the other stars. It doesn't matter if it large or small. They look to be the same size. The only way you can get an idea of a star size is System map.

That why my idea works out. Players get somewhat the scale of a star. It doesn't have to Super close to the stars. Just that visual feel of different star sizes. Instead, one size fits all that we currently have now.

Take a look at post #24. As many have been trying to explain, note the distance. If you compare various stars at a fixed distance they clearly vary in sizes by colossal amounts. It is the fact that we drop out at various distances (based on star radius and mass)that gives the illusion of stars in-game being similar in size.

We are really getting into father ted territory here :-/

They are proper size. Human minds fail to deal with sense of scale without any reference point.

Is it just me, or do you find it kinda weird that some people don't seem to understand that?
 

Lestat

Banned
Take a look at post #24. As many have been trying to explain, note the distance. If you compare various stars at a fixed distance they clearly vary in sizes by colossal amounts. It is the fact that we drop out at various distances (based on star radius and mass)that gives the illusion of stars in-game being similar in size.
Don't you think they already have broken the rule with our ship and our life would be dead if we jump as close as we do already do? Give us some basic visual size of a star. Not system map scale. It doesn't have to be much.
 
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