Make black holes actually scary

DjVortex

DjVortex
Not having interacted much with black holes I might have misunderstood something, but it is my understanding that black holes, while they look scary and confusing, are completely harmless. If I understand correctly, it's essentially impossible to have your ship damaged by a black hole.

This shouldn't be so! Make black holes actually scary! Make them the mighty forces that they actually are!

I'm thinking something along the lines of that if you start getting too close to a black hole, the ship's computer starts giving you warnings about the gravitational field becoming too strong and compromising the integrity of the ship's hull, and if you keep getting closer warning lights and sounds start up, with the ship's computer giving you even stronger warnings that the ship is in imminent danger of destruction, have the dashboard displays start getting more and more distorted, have sparks flying, have the hull and other components take more and more damage. If the hull gets completely destroyed, maybe even have an outside view animation of the ship getting ripped apart, or something. Make it actually scary to approach a black hole!

Sure, this isn't a gameplay feature, nor does it add anything beneficial to the players, but it adds flavor, and that shouldn't be underestimated. A big part (perhaps even the major part) of why I'm addicted to this game is its visuals and flavor.
 

Alaska Sædelære

Alaska Sædelære
I like the idea and think it would be an interesting addition to do something creative with black holes. Under any degree of realism though, one would be crushed beyond recognition before getting anywhere near the event horizon. On the other hand it's a popular theme in science fiction, or partly even in real science, to suggest they might be endpoints of wormholes one could traverse to cover great distances in no time, or other phenomena beyond our current understanding.

Would it make sense if, for the sake of gameplay, entering such a black hole/wormhole would transport the player to another black hole anywhere in the galaxy picked randomly every time, with chaotic side effects in form of module failures and damages similar to those suffered by Thargoid lightning or weapons with scramble spectrum and phasing sequence effects. These effects are severe and more enduring than what one is familiar with from known combat situations, so it will take longer to recover and mean exposure to unknown risks on the other side. But it should be scaled to what the ship is rated to endure, i.e. enable anyone to attempt the passage (maybe with the possible exemption of classic "paper ship" explorer builds, who would be ill-advised to go there.) To counter the possible attraction of ganking during the downtime, anyone firing a weapon near a black hole should only experience the damage entirely reflected back to the source, or simply contained and dissipated within the ship immediately, unable to deal any damage. We'll find a plausible-sounding explanation for such an effect.
 

Dillon Fallon

Dillon Fallon
Before my time, but I believe they used to be. Then players started having issues like losing their exploration data, so they complained and FDev made them harmless.
 

Alaska Sædelære

Alaska Sædelære
Indeed? Interesting. I mean in that case the risk should be known and avoidable by anyone with valuables on board. If it lead to unpleasant surprises back then, of course the protest is understandable.
 

DjVortex

DjVortex
Put "Dangerous" back in "Elite Dangerous", I say. Players don't need to be coddled. If they go too close to a black hole, regardless of the warnings, they do so at their own risk.
 

Crank Larson

Crank Larson
Alaska Sædelære said:
Would it make sense if, for the sake of gameplay, entering such a black hole/wormhole would transport the player to another black hole anywhere in the galaxy picked randomly every time, with chaotic side effects in form of module failures and damages similar to those suffered by Thargoid lightning or weapons with scramble spectrum and phasing sequence effects.
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Not really, besides that's straight from the NMS playbook. :D

Black holes have never been dangerous. As with stars, the ship will drop you out of supercruise instead of letting you get too close. It seems perfectly reasonable that a ship would have safety mechanisms like this.

Binary stars used to be interesting when you could be dropped pretty much in the second star on occasions. Now the drop point has been moved further out.
 

Alaska Sædelære

Alaska Sædelære
Crank Larson said:
Not really, besides that's straight from the NMS playbook. :D

Black holes have never been dangerous. As with stars, the ship will drop you out of supercruise instead of letting you get too close. It seems perfectly reasonable that a ship would have safety mechanisms like this.

Binary stars used to be interesting when you could be dropped pretty much in the second star on occasions. Now the drop point has been moved further out.
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I see, haven't played NMS.

Taking random death out of normal travel mode or at least greatly reducing it was a good move imo. And of course the above isn't meant as something you would run into haphazardly while in supercruise travel, but pose a calculated risk for the adventurous. You need to make a choice to enter it, not as a bad surprise. It could be something different, just thought OP does have a point that there is a content niche wanting to be filled.
 

DjVortex

DjVortex
To be clear: I'm completely 100% for black holes not destroying you immediately on entering a system. You would need to deliberately start approaching it in order for it to start damaging your ship. If you jump into a binary system where the secondary star is a black hole and you would jump into its fatal zone, I would agree that it would be better if the game positions you just outside of it instead.

But it would be cool if you get all those warnings, flying sparks, distorted dashboard displays and hull damage if you start approaching the black hole too close.
 

Brrokk

Brrokk
From a science point of view, there's no real reason for a black hole to be more dangerous than a star. Both have ferocious radiation (the star maybe more). Both have an approach distance where the FSD stops working. The whole thing about a black hole sucking stuff in like a plughole is no more scary than being sucked into a star. You should be able to orbit a black hole just as easily and safely as a star of the same mass.
 

Lhorndra

Lhorndra
DjVortex said:
This shouldn't be so! Make black holes actually scary! Make them the mighty forces that they actually are!
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They are not, like @Brrokk said.

If our real sun where a black hole with exactly the same mass, nothing would change in our solar system gravitationally. Of course, there would be no visible light and hence no life, but all the planets would orbit the black hole exactly like they are doing right now. Nothing would be sucked in. The gravitational interaction would be exactly the same. If you get too close to our sun, there's tons of radiation (= electro-magnetic interaction) that would be much more dangerous than the gravity. With a black hole, there could be less radiation, so it would actually be less dangerous than a star of the same mass. Gravity is the weakest fundamental interaction in the universe, by many orders of magnitude. Every black hole in the game, except Sagittarius A*, was once a rather big, but ordinary star. If you exchange that star with an appropriate black hole, nothing in that system would be different, except for the lighting.

We all accept that the FSD makes an emergency stop if we get to close to a star, so the same should apply to black holes, no? And the point of the emergency stop would be veeeery far away from the event horizon. If you wanna get sucked in behind the event horizon, than the FSD should also let you fly directly into a star. Like many thousand kms into it.
 
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DjVortex

DjVortex
Brrokk said:
From a science point of view, there's no real reason for a black hole to be more dangerous than a star. Both have ferocious radiation (the star maybe more). Both have an approach distance where the FSD stops working. The whole thing about a black hole sucking stuff in like a plughole is no more scary than being sucked into a star. You should be able to orbit a black hole just as easily and safely as a star of the same mass.
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Sure, if you stay at the same distance from its center as you do with a star.

Problem is, the radius of a typical Sol-like star is about 700000 km or more, while the radius of a stellar black hole is in the ballpark of 30 km. Which means you can get much, much closer to a black hole than your typical star. And once you become closer than that 700k km or so, the gravity is only going to get stronger and stronger. (If you somehow were able to enter a star and move towards its center, total gravity would become weaker and weaker instead, because more and more of the star's mass will be above you.)

For a 30 km radius object you can get incredibly close before you touch the event horizon. And gravity will rip anything apart long before you get even close to crossing it.

I don't know what the exclusion zone of a black hole is in ED, but I would guess it's much, much smaller than that of a star of the same mass.
 

Brrokk

Brrokk
DjVortex said:
Sure, if you stay at the same distance from its center as you do with a star.

Problem is, the radius of a typical Sol-like star is about 700000 km or more, while the radius of a stellar black hole is in the ballpark of 30 km. Which means you can get much, much closer to a black hole than your typical star. And once you become closer than that 700k km or so, the gravity is only going to get stronger and stronger. (If you somehow were able to enter a star and move towards its center, total gravity would become weaker and weaker instead, because more and more of the star's mass will be above you.)

For a 30 km radius object you can get incredibly close before you touch the event horizon. And gravity will rip anything apart long before you get even close to crossing it.

I don't know what the exclusion zone of a black hole is in ED, but I would guess it's much, much smaller than that of a star of the same mass.
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Good point. Since the exclusion zone is said to be because of gravity gradient stopping the FSD and it's always outside a star, it should be the same for a black hole and a star of equal masses. I haven't checked to see if it is; maybe they've tinkered with it for artistic reasons.
 

varonica

varonica
Brrokk said:
Good point. Since the exclusion zone is said to be because of gravity gradient stopping the FSD and it's always outside a star, it should be the same for a black hole and a star of equal masses. I haven't checked to see if it is; maybe they've tinkered with it for artistic reasons.
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Two objects of the same mass have the same gravity at the same distance away no matter the actual size of the object. Well assuming as point being the source of the gravity because once you get really close to the earths surface you can get a variable gravity effect from differing densities of matter and open underground volumes and mountains pulling sideways instead of down, but the principal stands so that the exclusion zone should be the same distance from the BH as from a star of the same mass. Point in example, white dwarfs have extremely large exclusion zones compared to their size in the game.
 
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Zieman

Zieman
varonica said:
but the principal stands so that the exclusion zone should be the same distance from the BH as from a star of the same mass
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Too bad that isn't the case in game. Or if it is, the distance isn't calculated from the center of mass, but the 'surface' of the object.
 

Coehoorn

Coehoorn
Alaska Sædelære said:
Indeed? Interesting. I mean in that case the risk should be known and avoidable by anyone with valuables on board. If it lead to unpleasant surprises back then, of course the protest is understandable.
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Then how do you explore black hole systems?


I agree with OP, black holes could have more to them than they do now, but without auto-dethrottle, the player often flies into them or misses them by a fraction 1-2 seconds after arrival, depending on how big they are.

There would be no point in exploring them, if they were deadly. They don't pay well, and rarely have celestial bodies that pay well around them.
 

DjVortex

DjVortex
varonica said:
Two objects of the same mass have the same gravity at the same distance away no matter the actual size of the object.
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At least Newtonially speaking. If you have a rotating black hole I wouldn't be so sure, relativistically speaking. The gravitational field takes weird shapes, you have frame-dragging, and all kind of fun stuff like that. (Although I suppose from far enough it doesn't make much of a difference.)
 
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