Blue and red: approaching the speed of light
- Thread starter Avnas
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That's only partially true. Actually, you'd observe trickier changes than just colour filtering since you're effectively shifting wavelengths, so depending on relative speed and looking ahead, something monochromatically red would shift through yellow to green to cyan to blue, and at the same time something blue would go violet and then just vanish from sight as it shifted to ultraviolet (you would also start to see oncoming TV remotes as they came out of their 950nm infrared regime). So far that's what you'd expect.
As you get closer to the speed of light, pretty much everything shining towards you gets shifted to ionising radiation, which is less fun (but also irrelevant as long as computer screens can't emit hard radiation).
Polychromatic stuff would undergo weirder changes since you'd shift their spectrum, and that's where you'd start running into issues with the art assets that only give rough interpretations within a very limited gamut of the working colour space (most likely sRGB), so the simulation would fail to retrieve details outside the visible spectrum, and even within huge parts of that, as they were shifted into the visible domain by the doppler effect. In reality, an object behind you that emits a lot of red light but also ultraviolet would actually become blue as you accelerated away from it; in the game, it would probably just become a black blob of nothing as the red part of the spectrum gets shifted out of sight.
Wouldn't that only be true for light sources that don't travel in the same speed as you? For instance the HUD and interior would look the same as it does now, pretty much the same way your car's horn doesn't sound different to the car's driver. But some doppler shift for stars and other light sources outside the spaceship would be awesome I think.
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The problem with trying to make this as realistic as possible (i.e. developing something akin to Doppler shift) is that it makes no sense to do so if you're just going to leave out other byproducts of traveling at/near the speed of light. For example, relativity states that as you get closer to the speed of light, your mass increases towards infinity, which is why seconds pass by for you and a much larger amount of time passes for those not going that fast. Someone else here in the forums asked something similar, and when I brought this up, they mentioned an Alcubierre drive (or something similar). The issue with that, though, is that you wouldn't (or shouldn't, anyway, although I could be wrong about this) experience the Doppler shift, as you technically aren't traveling faster than the speed of light - you're warping spacetime around you.
That why it called the theory of Relativity. Because frames of reference relative to your space time bubble, look normal to you, and things relative to normal space are effected by doppler. Someone in normal space looking at your ship passing, if they could it, would see your ship doppler shifted.
And yes, it would look cool. It's a game, cool and fun should be given more weight than absolute realism. I am not sure what you would see if you were in visual range of a black hole but, I hope Frontier's art staff make those look really cool too!
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Yeah but, correct me if I'm wrong. Aren't our ships riding the "wake" of a "compressed wave" of space-time? That's why our tiny drives can do what they do. As in they don't really do the heavy lifting.
If we have a bubble of "normal" space wouldn't colours translate "normally"? Yet visual stimulus from outside the bubble would be distorted if seen at all? I dunno, not smart guy here but I don't get the rainbow theory.
Oh just read previous post. nvm
If we have a bubble of "normal" space wouldn't colours translate "normally"? Yet visual stimulus from outside the bubble would be distorted if seen at all? I dunno, not smart guy here but I don't get the rainbow theory.
Oh just read previous post. nvm
But we're not actually travelling near or over the speed of light. We're shifting our frame of reference into Witchspace, taking short cuts through it to get where we want to go faster than if we'd have to slug through good old normal space. In Supercruise, we're only partly into Witchspace, allowing us to see normal space and leave Witchspace on our own. During a hyperspace jump, we're deep into Witchspace, and relying on the gravity of our target system's largest star to drag us out again.