"Please stay 30 feet from the airlock at all times. Violations will be met with lethal force."
Are people okay with "space fog"?
- Thread starter Stealthie
- Start date
"Please stay 30 feet from the airlock at all times. Violations will be met with lethal force."
It doesn't need testing, simple physics tells you that anything ejected from a station will travel with the orbital velocity of the station plus any velocity given to it from the act of ejection, it doesn't suddenly stop dead in space if you throw it out the window!
If you want it to move away from the station you need to impart some velocity to it, in the case of a continuously replenished cloud from slowly leaking vent then it would indeed seem to hang around as it slowly dispersed, narrow the vent exit and give it some decent exit velocity then it will move away, but it will also push the station out of orbit so you would need to continuously adjust the station position, so much better to have a very slow leak from a very large vent than a fast leak from a small vent and you wouldget a cloud that appears to hang around the station.
Of course in the case of very large stations there would be a small amount of gravity associated with the station itself and slowly ejected gas might actually be attracted back toward the stations, and of course if the station is in the Stable Lagrange point that would also be another factor in the accumulation of a cloud of dust and gas around the station.
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Artificial gravity was 'introduced' just after FD decided to put an expresso machine in the cockpit of the Krait Mk II
https://i.imgur.com/2eR51I4.jpg
Care to explain how that all stays in one place (and how it operates) if there is no gravity in the ship?
P.S. Yes I know there isn't artificial gravity in the game, but then the game does things like above - all too confusing
I don't wanna be a party-pooper, but the coffee maker doesn't necessarily mean anything. It could just be understood by a pilot that the coffee maker should only be used when docked at a station where there would be forces at play to make it work as expected.
Minor nitpick but thats an espresso machine, it works on pressure not gravity. Now getting it into the CUP would be a challenge but the machine itself would work just fine in microgravity. Although the mess when your canopy breached would be epic.
It's good that there is fog.
But is needed a balance with and without.
But is needed a balance with and without.
"Please stay 30 feet from the airlock at all times. Violations will be met with lethal force."
The last cigarette of the condemned then ?
You guys are funny. A station that emits pollution, what do you think will happen? That the smoke will trail like a chimney/comet? The gas is falling around the planet at the same rate as the station through a vacuum. It experiences only micro-gravity of the station, heating effects, brownian motion, and disturbances from landing space craft.
OH man, i just realized it sais "fog" in the OP's first post and not "frog" lol...
So that must be where T.j drinks?. I had a feeling he'd be to blame somehow. I'm all for seeing the spacefog spewing out of vents, and for the neon glow of the bar and the headlights. Very cyberpunk.
The galactic map is really smooth in the beta, which in VR is so much better than jerky motion. Maybe That smoothness has something to do with the fog. I don't know. I suppose the map could include a "fog on/ fog off" option for people with powerful computers.
The heck? There is a lot, and I mean "roughly the mass of the Galaxy" scale of "a lot" of misconceptions floating (heh) around in this thread. I'm going to address them from a realism viewpoint, rather than an artistic viewpoint, as I actually got a literal zero in my second semester of grade 9 art, so I'm obviously highly qualified to AVOID art discussions (haha).
Dust particles and gas molecules will disperse rapidly. Very rapidly. Gas molecules are always zipping around, bouncing off the edges of the container they're stored in. Take the container away? Poof, they're gone. In space, there's nothing to hold them back (electrostatic force is a repulsion a third of the time, and zero another third). Dust would depart in a less energetic manner, as it's generally 'at rest' rather than bouncing around. However, each particle of dust is in a different orbit, and without something physical to hold them together, they will depart each other's vicinity in short order. The only ones that would stay together are ones that are in the exact same orbital altitude, eccentricity and inclination, but a different phase (ones in the exact same phase would be inside each other). And they'd make a curving line that would slowly rotate as it went around the parent body.
The behavior of gas in space can be seen in rocket engines. In atmosphere, they tend to make these long, tubular columns of fire and steam/smoke that generally hang together, but in a vacuum, they disperse rapidly, really only being visible inside the bell/immediately outside as a rapidly expanding cone. The ascent stage of the American LEM was filmed via remote camera departing from the Moon, which shows this quite well. The quality is kinda low (60s/70s video not exactly being super high definition), but it shows how subtle an engine in a vacuum is. Also it's very cool and worth watching on it's own.
https://youtu.be/wFuKCB7L1WY?t=1843
(time index is important here, it's around 30:43 if the t= stamp doesn't carry through for whatever reason. most of the video is the LEM sitting on the moon heh)
Note how it lacks the atmospheric-style plume at all. The (lack of) quality makes it impossible (at least for me) to see the dispersed, subtle, vacuum-style plume at all.
The picture of Enceladus is funny - that ring would not be visible up close. It's optical depth (inner E ring) is about 10^-6. That's like..a slight haze. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/satringfact.html . Interesting tidbit: The rings are VERY thin - 5 to 20m (a meter is about yard for anybody still using legacy units). The rings in ED are much thicker heh.
Of course, ED is a huge compromise between reality and gameplay (super dense asteroid belts/rings, Star Wars-style "flying", faster than light travel, generators that are 64x bigger only producing 3x the power etc) out of necessity, and I can understand why they'd want to do that for gameplay or artistic license reasons.. but at least UNDERSTAND that the fog is #lolfake, and not even remotely realistic.
TL;DR: The fog is #lolfake. It's rule-of-cool, not realism.
Dust particles and gas molecules will disperse rapidly. Very rapidly. Gas molecules are always zipping around, bouncing off the edges of the container they're stored in. Take the container away? Poof, they're gone. In space, there's nothing to hold them back (electrostatic force is a repulsion a third of the time, and zero another third). Dust would depart in a less energetic manner, as it's generally 'at rest' rather than bouncing around. However, each particle of dust is in a different orbit, and without something physical to hold them together, they will depart each other's vicinity in short order. The only ones that would stay together are ones that are in the exact same orbital altitude, eccentricity and inclination, but a different phase (ones in the exact same phase would be inside each other). And they'd make a curving line that would slowly rotate as it went around the parent body.
The behavior of gas in space can be seen in rocket engines. In atmosphere, they tend to make these long, tubular columns of fire and steam/smoke that generally hang together, but in a vacuum, they disperse rapidly, really only being visible inside the bell/immediately outside as a rapidly expanding cone. The ascent stage of the American LEM was filmed via remote camera departing from the Moon, which shows this quite well. The quality is kinda low (60s/70s video not exactly being super high definition), but it shows how subtle an engine in a vacuum is. Also it's very cool and worth watching on it's own.
https://youtu.be/wFuKCB7L1WY?t=1843
(time index is important here, it's around 30:43 if the t= stamp doesn't carry through for whatever reason. most of the video is the LEM sitting on the moon heh)
Note how it lacks the atmospheric-style plume at all. The (lack of) quality makes it impossible (at least for me) to see the dispersed, subtle, vacuum-style plume at all.
The picture of Enceladus is funny - that ring would not be visible up close. It's optical depth (inner E ring) is about 10^-6. That's like..a slight haze. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/satringfact.html . Interesting tidbit: The rings are VERY thin - 5 to 20m (a meter is about yard for anybody still using legacy units). The rings in ED are much thicker heh.
Of course, ED is a huge compromise between reality and gameplay (super dense asteroid belts/rings, Star Wars-style "flying", faster than light travel, generators that are 64x bigger only producing 3x the power etc) out of necessity, and I can understand why they'd want to do that for gameplay or artistic license reasons.. but at least UNDERSTAND that the fog is #lolfake, and not even remotely realistic.
TL;DR: The fog is #lolfake. It's rule-of-cool, not realism.
Clouds of gas do exist in space, and you're very specifically referencing vapor from rocket exhaust, which this is very clearly not.
Speaking of FPS, I'm opposed to anything that lowers my frames per second without giving me something substantial in return. Does this space fog change FPS at all? Normally adding an effect would lower FPS, but perhaps it's covering low LOD objects hidden in the fog as a way to actually improve FPS...
Well... It's the closest thing we have to an "atmosphere" so..... I say leave it as is.
Citation needed. There's nothing out there like we see in the Beta (especially that screenshot the OP posted, but also I've seen some crazy stuff in the planetary rings at hotspots); only very diffuse things on a mega scale. Further, the only difference between dust and gas boils down to the initial velocity, and I did address that in my post.
They're like smog: I live in Toronto, which is somewhat smoggy, with this disguising purple-brown haze over it. From a distance, it almost looks like a solid dome of lung cancer, but when you're inside it, it's not apparent at all at short ranges. The next building over from me is perfectly clearly visible on a normal day (it's about 50m away; not currently visible as it's trying it's best to rain/snow). Another building across the valley is also clearly visible on sunny days, which (according to google maps) is 650m away. However, when I look to the horizon, I can see the purple-brown smog, but that's looking through at least 50km of air (probably a lot more).
Most of the things you see in the pictures are tens of thousands of km in size, or even thousands of light years (nebulae) etc. If you were smack dab in the middle of such a thing, and a station was less than 10km away, the station would be crystal clear to you, and the nebula would appear to be 'behind' the station.
Oh duh, I forgot the perfect example. The atmosphere itself is blue. Does it look blue at human ranges? Oh heck no. You don't see blue when looking at your hand, or a nearby building, or even a building across the city... But it does from space/looking at the sky.
Consider this: an orbit around the Earth of 400km altitude (400,000m; slightly below the ISS at this moment), in which sits a single speck of dust. Above it orbits another, single speck of dust, at 400,001m (we'll say that inclination and eccentricity is zero for both). The circumference of orbit for the first particle is 42 543 448, and the second is 42 543 454m - that means that the higher particle is falling behind by 6m per orbit. The orbital time is about 92 mins, 24 seconds. So every hour, about 4.5m of difference. It won't be long before they're on opposite sides of the planet..and that's just a single meter. I think the Anaconda is like 150m-ish for comparison.
NB: in the example, the second particle would have slightly lower orbital velocity. If you made the velocities the same in the initial state, the orbit of the second particle would be eccentric, that is, it's aphelion would be higher than it's perihelion, and the 400,001m part would be the perihelion.
That ignores the fact that 400km is still inside the atmosphere (thermosphere to be exact), and that the particles will be scattered by the smattering of air molecules that come in. Plus I'm also ignoring gravitational anomalies as those are actually beyond my capability to consider, aside from the fact that they tend to destabilize orbits, such as that of the PFS-2 mini-lunar-satellite launched by Apollo 16 (see Wikipedia/Perturbation Effects and Wikipedia/Apollo16/PFS-2 ) .. 'non-stable orbits' sounds bad for clouds of dust, I'd say..
The only way you'd see clouds like that is if something was creating it at a very high rate and in a constant fashion..or if you were in very, very, very deep interstellar or intergalactic space (in which case you might end up with a cloud of dust orbiting the station itself).
I hope I'm explaining this in a sufficiently jargon-free manner. I'm not a big fan of jargon, but it's kinda unavoidable with orbital mechanics... :/
TL;DR: Orbital mechanics are complicated and hate particle clouds of any kind, dust or gas. Dust clouds in space are very sparse at human scales.