Interesting rings
- Thread starter Saool
- Start date
I found a planet with rings similar to your 4th picture (and I assume the next couple are different angles of the same one?). If yours is anything like mine it was considered a single ring even though there is a huge gap between them. I tested that by flying through the gap several times. I figured if it wasn't truly a gap and just sparsely populated then the game would force me to drop from SC but it did not do that and I was able to fly through the gap without issue. Maybe I'll post a picture of mine when I get home. I love finding interesting rings!
I think whether they are one ring or not depends on whether they maintain the same orbital velocity, separate rings will be vastly different. I have seen a ring with many gaps you can fly straight through, and a week or so ago I got pulled out of SC by a ring I couldn't even see, so results vary.
Interesting, I had not thought of that being the way to classify separate rings! I had never thought about it much though to be completely honest. There's always something new to learn about this game!
here is the one I found:
EDIT: Looking back through screenshots, I have so many pictures of cool rings that I wish I would have payed closer attention to... I am too quick to take a picture and move on without really thinking about how these things actually work. I need to change that about myself.
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Well the way the game treats rings is as a single object, so that the outer objects composing a ring aren't moving at orbital velocity, they are moving at radial velocity, if an asteroid at the inner edge of a ring takes one day to orbit the planet the asteroids at the outer edge of the ring will also orbit in a day, making them travel much faster than they should if they were orbiting correctly.
If you have two rings only a few dozen or hundred kilometers apart and fly in real space from the inner edge of the outer ring to the outer edge of the inner ring those asteroids will be passing by blurringly fast because you still have the slower orbital velocity of the outer ring rather than the radial velocity of the inner ring. It's not correct of course, but that's how the game models them.
Ha, I have a whole collection of ringed bodies not being gas giants. Here a recent example, a ringed water world:
And here the one which sort of started my quest for collecting them:
