Regarding animated visuals, I really like how lots of little details work in a plausible way in ED, e.g., landing gear, moving thrusters, booster burn, decaying paint, the pilot models gazing around, unfolding hardpoints, and I am especially fond of the heat radiators opening and glowing in flight, depending on heat level.
However, there is one crucial system, that lacks visual appearance: The fuel scoop.
Once employed, you hear it humming and gargling down liquefied hydrogen, but if you change to outside view, there is abolutly nothing to indicate that you are actually collecting fuel from the stars corona.
This may be somewhat accurate, as a corona is still pretty close to a good vacuum in its outer layers, and the luminosity or light density would close up probably be negligible and drowned out against the backdrop of the raging photosphere, but...still....it would be sooo nice to actually SEE your ship refuelling.
I thought about how this might work, and how this might actually look and came up with something like this:
Sucking a stream of hot gas directly from the star seems implausible.
What we already have, is the visual effects of shields (getting hit, reconstituting), which according to lore, form a kind of electromagnetiv bubble around the vessel. They are already animated, and come in different colours, and generally, I really like how the look and work.
Starting from the idea, that the Fuel scoop utilises strong electromagnetic fields to collect hydrogen plasma, decelerate the ions, guide them to a funnel and finally neutralise them to collect hydrogen gas, probably in liquid form, I imagined something like how the earth´s magnetic field produces auroras, only a lot smaller and ridiculously strong: A magnetic field surrounding the ship, that guides a layer of streaks of dense hydrogen plasma, following the field lines, towards a funnel. I thought it plausible that the funnel would be in the upper rear part of the vessel, opposite of the direction of solar wind, and I envisioned, the hydrogen plasma might have a bluzeish glow in a deceleration shockfront, and a purplish glow while it is guided towards the neutralisation funnel, but I didn´t calculate this, so please correct me if I am wrong. How this is supposed to work inside the Abucierre bubble during supercruise, I have no idea, but I imagine something like this, I hope this could be doable, and I really, really would like to see something like that in a future patch.
I am perfectly aware of the fact that I am neither a talented nor skilled digital artist, but I hope this rough sketch at least gets the message across what I had in mind:
Edit: I accidentally deleted the image, now re-uploaded it.
in my imagination, this would be moving towards the funnel in a way similar to how northern lights move, like snakelike streaks moving from the belly/nose towards the funnel.
I could also imagine that the fuel scoop uses the same opening that is used for regular refuelling at stations, and internally consists of some coils wrapped around the port for guiding and cooling the plasma.
Anyway, hope you like it.
Edit: this is an animated version:
However, there is one crucial system, that lacks visual appearance: The fuel scoop.
Once employed, you hear it humming and gargling down liquefied hydrogen, but if you change to outside view, there is abolutly nothing to indicate that you are actually collecting fuel from the stars corona.
This may be somewhat accurate, as a corona is still pretty close to a good vacuum in its outer layers, and the luminosity or light density would close up probably be negligible and drowned out against the backdrop of the raging photosphere, but...still....it would be sooo nice to actually SEE your ship refuelling.
I thought about how this might work, and how this might actually look and came up with something like this:
Sucking a stream of hot gas directly from the star seems implausible.
What we already have, is the visual effects of shields (getting hit, reconstituting), which according to lore, form a kind of electromagnetiv bubble around the vessel. They are already animated, and come in different colours, and generally, I really like how the look and work.
Starting from the idea, that the Fuel scoop utilises strong electromagnetic fields to collect hydrogen plasma, decelerate the ions, guide them to a funnel and finally neutralise them to collect hydrogen gas, probably in liquid form, I imagined something like how the earth´s magnetic field produces auroras, only a lot smaller and ridiculously strong: A magnetic field surrounding the ship, that guides a layer of streaks of dense hydrogen plasma, following the field lines, towards a funnel. I thought it plausible that the funnel would be in the upper rear part of the vessel, opposite of the direction of solar wind, and I envisioned, the hydrogen plasma might have a bluzeish glow in a deceleration shockfront, and a purplish glow while it is guided towards the neutralisation funnel, but I didn´t calculate this, so please correct me if I am wrong. How this is supposed to work inside the Abucierre bubble during supercruise, I have no idea, but I imagine something like this, I hope this could be doable, and I really, really would like to see something like that in a future patch.
I am perfectly aware of the fact that I am neither a talented nor skilled digital artist, but I hope this rough sketch at least gets the message across what I had in mind:
Edit: I accidentally deleted the image, now re-uploaded it.
in my imagination, this would be moving towards the funnel in a way similar to how northern lights move, like snakelike streaks moving from the belly/nose towards the funnel.
I could also imagine that the fuel scoop uses the same opening that is used for regular refuelling at stations, and internally consists of some coils wrapped around the port for guiding and cooling the plasma.
Anyway, hope you like it.
Edit: this is an animated version:
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