Blown Out Canopy idea

[OtakuMage]

Many of us have been there. For some reason or another, our canopy is destroyed and we are on life support. This raises a question for me:

Why is there nothing but glass around one of the most critical sections of the ship?

In many sci-fi franchises, from Alien to Star Trek, there are secondary systems to cover large exposed viewing areas. For Elite Dangerous, I'm thinking the backup would be blast shutters. A set of metal plates that would cover and seal the breached canopy, cutting off the view to the space outside but maintaining atmosphere.

This would not be an invincible defense against canopy sniping for PVP, however, merely another layer like the shields and armor the ship already carries. The bigger impact would be on navigation. Despite being in the 34th century, we still rely on visual navigation for much of our fine flight maneuvers. Loss of the canopy comes with loss of the HUD in the blown out area. The raised metal plates could still have the HUD projected onto it, possibly even showing everything that Night Vision illuminates since that is already a HUD overlay, but your exact position in space would be cut off.

This is not a perfect suggestion and would need some balancing for sure. It just seems like a logical thing for the ships in Elite to have since they insist on still using exposed cockpits.

Edit: Some friends think it would be cool if, when the shutters close, your view was changed to the old-school wireframe of the original Elite (obviously with some additions for all the new stuff).

 

[Sylow]

If everything would be logical, we'd be flying spheres with hard metal hull all around. There'd just be small ports for weapons, thrusters and the likes, while the pilot would be deep inside and observe everything over cameras and monitors.

And actually that was how things were even explained in my C64 Elite: F1 to F4 switched between different camera views, while the pilot was deep inside the ship, protected from damage. So yes, by logic you are absolutely right, the current canopy makes very little sense. But for gameplay purposes it works. It requires you to build your ship accordingly and it definitely adds thrill and atmosphere to the game (while not necessarily to the ships cockpit) when the canopy starts to crack and then blows out.

It kind of fits to the "WW2 Planes in space" flair of ED.

 

[Azmuth Divarchchron]

I once made the suggestion that we should atleast have the option to get "military grade canopies" on ships that were more combat oriented or combat capable.
these canopies would deploy armored shudders over the canopy window when hardpoints were deployed and the canopy would display video of what was going on outside the ship.
if the shudders failed then it would reveal the canopy glass which would be vulnerable to breaking.

But it never gained much traction.