PLEASE FRONTIER - I've been asking for YEARSSSSSS. Update blackholes!

[Darth Ender]

nothing about deep space exploration should be safe and calm. It should be something only the brave and/or stupid attempt.

This is directly contradictory to Fdev's goal of making exploration a screenshot game mechanic you can have on while watching netflix or reading a book.

and it seems unlikely we'll see fdev compromise that vision by making some systems dangerous ...since it's been an issue for 7 years and it hasn't changed.

Black holes, like comets and rogue planets and dark systems etc. are all unfinished placeholders that will likely never see any completion.

 

[Morbad]

damage by black holes was asked to be removed/nerfed i think more along the lines of "black holes dont emit heat (ignoring hawking radiation) so this is wrong from a simulation point of view"

Not in that players wanted a safer game with less risk and danger.

I always figured the heat was supposed to be a half- simulation of the ships thrusters or drives fighting those tidal forces.

I'm just thinking of how to make it 'player friendly', so we don't get another chorus of the complaints that made them completely unbelievable and immersion breaking

Player friendly singularities are rather unbelievable and immersion breaking. If people want to get too close, let them be torn to pieces I say.

 

[Darth Ender]

I always figured the heat was supposed to be a half- simulation of the ships thrusters or drives fighting those tidal forces.

nah... do you heat up to risky levels leaving a planet with your magic landing thrusters that always exceed gravity? no.

Do you heat up to dangerous levels accelerating at max supercruise speed from a stop? no.

Heat is the only thing the game applies as "energy damage" ... and black holes being stars acquired the heat attribute ...the same way Y dwarfs acquire the emitting light attribute ...even though both have no business with either.

I think it was fdev's attempt to make black holes dangerous, and their only option was heat. But heat just doesn't make sense without an accretion disk, and they cant' seem to implement that. So the whole thing just looked ridiculous, and so it was toned way down.

If only the game supported ionizing radiation as a hazard source. Then we could go somewhere. Not just with black holes but gas giants and other stars too. Fuel scooping could be risky and something to master and justify the idea of buying fuel at stations and such, and serve as a natural barrier to exploration.

 

[Morbad]

nah... do you heat up to risky levels leaving a planet with your magic landing thrusters that always exceed gravity?

If the ventral thrusters aren't facing the planet, sure.

Do you heat up to dangerous levels accelerating at max supercruise speed from a stop? no.

Black holes could easily have been a special case as few other phenomena could result in such extreme gravitational gradients/tidal forces.

I think it was fdev's attempt to make black holes dangerous, and their only option was heat. But heat just doesn't make sense without an accretion disk, and they cant' seem to implement that. So the whole thing just looked ridiculous, and so it was toned way down.

If only the game supported ionizing radiation as a hazard source. Then we could go somewhere. Not just with black holes but gas giants and other stars too. Fuel scooping could be risky and something to master and justify the idea of buying fuel at stations and such, and serve as a natural barrier to exploration.

Not much ionizing radiation from a black hole without an accretion disk either.

Regardless, there is already precedent for damage other than heat...the "hazardous environment" and "overload damage" used for jet cones. Which could be built upon and applied to any of these things.

 

[Darth Ender]

If the ventral thrusters aren't facing the planet, sure.



Black holes could easily have been a special case as few other phenomena could result in such extreme gravitational gradients/tidal forces.



Not much ionizing radiation from a black hole without an accretion disk either.

Regardless, there is already precedent for damage other than heat...the "hazardous environment" and "overload damage" used for jet cones. Which could be built upon and applied to any of these things.

you would almost certainly have a range of radiation belts around a black hole even without a visible accretion disk. The same way there are belts around the earth and more relevant, jupiter that are highly dangerous and entirely invisible to the human eye.

Hazardous environment does exist but it's unclear if they are actually an artifact of the environment, or something that the game client displays in your ship as a response to supercharging your FSD.

If we only see those warnings when the FSD is charging, then it wouldn't be a potential option for places where that doesn't occur.

If it is an attribute of the space the stellar forge generates, then the big question is, why has it not been backported to black holes ? It would seem to be an obvious use for such a hazard. I'd only have to assume that screenshots trump risk and potential gameplay.

 

[Morbad]

Hazardous environment does exist but it's unclear if they are actually an artifact of the environment, or something that the game client displays in your ship as a response to supercharging your FSD.

If we only see those warnings when the FSD is charging, then it wouldn't be a potential option for places where that doesn't occur.

These effects are in normal space and don't rely on the FSD charging (or even being functional).

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz-0ZAV8zzk

Source: https://youtu.be/UIgrOgOLBBg?t=3170

Source: https://youtu.be/5kiT84wgmt0?t=2236

If it is an attribute of the space the stellar forge generates

It's an attribute applied to the space within or the immediate confines of any jet cone and it's effects get more severe the deeper inside the cone you go.

then the big question is, why has it not been backported to black holes ? It would seem to be an obvious use for such a hazard. I'd only have to assume that screenshots trump risk and potential gameplay.

Yes, that is my question as well.

 

[Zak Gordon]

Player friendly singularities are rather unbelievable and immersion breaking. If people want to get too close, let them be torn to pieces I say.

Well is it better like it is? Compromise is an option unless we like it like it is now.

 

[Morbad]

Well is it better like it is? Compromise is an option unless we like it like it is now.

No, but just putting heating back in is something of a one-eighth measure.

 

[Zak Gordon]

Better than the dead-dog Black Holes we currently have though. I mean from how i've understood it at some point they were dangerous, and for some reason enough people complained and now they are rubbish. So yeah i'm all for thrashing out a compromise just to have them be something like they should be (dangerous), while not causing people to throw their dolls out the air-lock.

 

[Darth Ender]

the option to do something and not do it for black holes is almost as frustrating as the ability to actually collide with plasma arcs coming out of stars ...but fdev making almost all of them too low within the confines of the exclusion zone to ever be interactable while scooping.

That's something that could be leveraged to make some stars more risky to scoop at vs others ...but just wasted. why bother even giving them a collidable mesh? I dont get their intention with exploration. It really doesn't make much sense the gameplay choices made and the ones avoided.

 

[Fizzatron]

It would be nice if they had more spin and there was a real risk of getting trapped, as the ship slowly degrades as it is sucked into the center. Why not, create a suction animation going through the different layers of the black hole, representing the madness that would be seen in free fall towards the singularity.

Even if the accretion disk exists, visible or not, it should affect and heat the spaces of the ship.

Problem with that is how to reconcile being permanently unreconstructible lost information sucked into a black hole with finding yourself at the rebuy screen? I mean, we still don't know how it's done currently even without blackholes, but that's not the point right now. <ahem> Unless blackhole death equals permadeath for your CMDR?

 

[Darth Ender]

Problem with that is how to reconcile being permanently unreconstructible lost information sucked into a black hole with finding yourself at the rebuy screen? I mean, we still don't know how it's done currently even without blackholes, but that's not the point right now. <ahem> Unless blackhole death equals permadeath for your CMDR?

same way they do everything else that doesn't make sense, not explain it and just go "gameplay"

That's the foundation of telepresence in the game. They're fine with that.

 

[Fizzatron]

same way they do everything else that doesn't make sense, not explain it and just go "gameplay"

That's the foundation of telepresence in the game. They're fine with that.

True, but what would be your solution to the problem? It's online so no save states, the only other thing I can think of would be permadeath and restart with a new commander. In the second suggestion, I daresay that losing all assets would be a far less acceptable scenario for the overwhelming majority than 'because gameplay', though there could be an inheritance system whereby assets are passed down to another commander for whatever reasons, but then it would just be effectively the same as we currently have?

 

[Darth Ender]

True, but what would be your solution to the problem? It's online so no save states, the only other thing I can think of would be permadeath and restart with a new commander. In the second suggestion, I daresay that losing all assets would be a far less acceptable scenario for the overwhelming majority than 'because gameplay', though there could be an inheritance system whereby assets are passed down to another commander for whatever reasons, but then it would just be effectively the same as we currently have?

dying by blackhole would be treated like dying by any star. Nothing special needs to be put in place.

A more important question is, what would you do to make black holes worth trying to investigate in the first place to warrant the effort needed to make them dangerous?

that's the big unknown. Do you finally make exploration worthwhile and meaningful by placing something unique to acquire on successfully surviving such a danger? Do you just up the payout? Do you create new gameplay around it?


And if you make it dangerous how do you make it dangerous in a way that can be mastered thru experience and skill so it doesn't become just a time sink interruption?

What you do when you die is not even a concern.

 

[Morbad]

I mean, we still don't know how it's done currently even without blackholes

That bit of handwavium is in the manual. The ejection sequence features an FTL microjump.

 

[varonica]

The game doesn't mandate that we orbit stars. Even in normal space we can hold a fixed position relative to them because the gravity isn't simulated for our ships if the body isn't landable (and even then the effect ends at an arbitrary distance). I can drop out of SC at a range where the orbital period would be extremely low and look at a static skybox because my CMDR's ship isn't actually moving.

Yes that's true, it's very simplified, they can't simulate gravity out to infinity as it actually does, that would take to much computing power so the effects are range limited, and it's not gravity that makes bodies orbit, they are basically on a pre-programmed path, but that's understandable due to the demands it would put on the game to actually simulate gravity with any sort of realism, so we have to accept some compromises, but it should be possible to work out the safe distance from a black hole and make it unsafe if you get closer, and that's the main thing we are discussing.

 

[varonica]

you would almost certainly have a range of radiation belts around a black hole even without a visible accretion disk. The same way there are belts around the earth and more relevant, jupiter that are highly dangerous and entirely invisible to the human eye.

No I don't think you would, that's the big thing about black holes, they are very hard to spot, and that's because the only way to spot them is thier effect on other objects and light itself due to gravity. If they had radiation belts they would be relatively easy to spot, a radiation belt in space with no visible source? Black hole. Radiation around planets like Jupiter and earth is an effect of the internally generated magnetic field and the suns radiation and mass ejection, radiation around Neutron stars is due to extremely twisted magnetic fields, magnetars! None of these effects apply to black holes because nothing can escape from a black hole.

 

[Darth Ender]

No I don't think you would, that's the big thing about black holes, they are very hard to spot, and that's because the only way to spot them is thier effect on other objects and light itself due to gravity. If they had radiation belts they would be relatively easy to spot, a radiation belt in space with no visible source? Black hole. Radiation around planets like Jupiter and earth is an effect of the internally generated magnetic field and the suns radiation and mass ejection, radiation around Neutron stars is due to extremely twisted magnetic fields, magnetars! None of these effects apply to black holes because nothing can escape from a black hole.

a radiation belt can be contained with very little of it escaping the orbit of the ions flowing around it.

that's what makes them radiation belts and not just plain radiation

So the idea that you wouldn't be able to detect it from very far away is not unrealistic. These would be like extremely sparse rings of subatomic particles accelerated to significant (but not light) speeds by the gravity well.

this would be opposed to the way they form around planets and stars, via magnetic fields.

 

[varonica]

a radiation belt can be contained with very little of it escaping the orbit of the ions flowing around it.

that's what makes them radiation belts and not just plain radiation

No that's the point, a radiation belt needs to be contained by "something". In the case of planets and stars it's the magnetic field they generate that does the containing, ions don't orbit, they travel in a straight line unless constrained by some force, and there is no such constraining force around a black hole because the only effect a black hole has on the universe is gravity. There is nothing around a black hole to hold the radiation in place to create a belt.

 

[GunnerBill]

I could never have guessed the video would have been set to the music from Interstellar!

Never mind I suspect most black holes are boring just like in game but I still wonder why Sag A* hasn't been made a bit more special.