Black holes in the game are extremely impressive as this is the only game I’ve seen that bothers with the warping of light. I want to suggest making black holes even more dangerous as in real life black holes are bad news. You should not be able to escape black holes once you get too close. When jumping to a black hole system and you get to close to the black hole you will not emergency stop but still go forward due to the gravitational pull. And super cruise and warping out of the back hole will now be impossible. Although this is a game black holes should have the gravitational blue shift, falling into it and killing yourself and the entire realism of black holes. This is a game but if you bother putting as much effort to make the graphics of warping light then you should have no problem of implementing the point of no return, and making all black holes in game a death trap.
Make Black Holes more Dangerous
- Thread starter Cryptorm
- Start date
The rescue rangers couldnt get u then it'd be a perma death. Thats why you drop if u get close. U drop far enough away to be in an orbit as opposed to getting sucked in. I think they should have accretion disc but planet rings dont cast shadows still so dont expect much.
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I'd settle for them warping light from in-system objects instead of just the sky box. And maybe a super bright accretion disc that is indeed dangerous. You could imagine this being balanced by something like being able to scoop tritium or perform much longer jumps similar to neutron jumps, perhaps only between pairs of black holes within the appropriate range of each other.
Uh huh. So, any suggestions to make them more interesting without overly upsetting risk-averse players? Making them difficult to approach seems a possibile one. SC speed could become very slow (just like it does around massive objects, only more so because of black holes' peculiar properties), challenging the patience of casual players. Or by needing to manually disable FSD failsafes. So you have to really want to approach it. And then incentivise it, so that determined players will do.
My personal feeling is to just make them deadly and tell the risk averse to route filter around them. I mean really I have dropped into countless black holes, neutron stars WD's, if you get damaged or destroyed at a NS or WD it's because you weren't paying attention. Nah, just make them deadly if you get to close and tell everyone if they don't like it avoid them!
Unfortunately I am one voice among many!
What used to happen if you got 'too close' to a black-hole? Was it just a re-buy screen? What happens now, are they just not possible to approach? It would be good to have them cause your destruction (maybe as it was before) and force that re-buy, it would certainly be a valuable lesson for a player in terms of learning about our galaxy around us. Did you get clear warnings you were entering a path of no return due to the black hole and maybe some other clues (rising temps like when too close to a sun perhaps?), as long as it is obvious the danger is real, the player should be able to experience death by black hole imho.
So yeah i vote to make them 'Dangerous'(tm) once again, and leave the player to use their brain and freedom to decide how to deal with them.
So yeah i vote to make them 'Dangerous'(tm) once again, and leave the player to use their brain and freedom to decide how to deal with them.
Ok i can see why that would be a problem with the internal game lore perhaps?
No it isn't, the exclusion zone is to stop you getting to close to assets that aren't finished and ready to be accessed or not modelled insuch a way they look correct from up close, that's why it's possible to fly into the jet stream of a WD or neutron star and be destroyed. If you fly to close to a star yes you get kicked out by the exclusion zone, but you are still in a whole lot of trouble if you are running a hot ship, worse yet jumping into a system between two hot stars, which still happens sometimes, and getting out without getting destroyed absolutely requires you to avoid hitting the exclusion zone, if you do you are toast.
And I should point out plenty of people die on stair even with railings and grippy treads, if the idea was to keep you 100% safe then a big wall at the top of the stairs to stop you from using them at all is the ideal thing, that's the exclusion zone at the moment. Stair rails and grippy treads are there to provide a method of safely navigating the dangerous stairs, not to render them 100% harmless.
There's so much rubbish about black holes in ED it's unbelievable, even the wiki falls for this;
This entire statement is demonstrably not true, I never reduce throttle or use hyperspace dethrottle on black holes, black holes are only a problem if you are not paying attention while piloting your ship through the galaxy. Black Holes shouldn't be 100% safe, they're black holes, even regular stars are more dangerous than black holes, and that shouldn't be the case, getting to close to a black hole should be a big problem for a spaceship.
Realistically, an absolute majority of black holes are no more or less dangerous to a space traveller than "normal" stars. From afar, it's just a massive body that other bodies might orbit. Stray too close and you die. A 20-sol-masses giant has just as much gravitational pull at a given distance as a 20-sol-masses black hole, and could be just as deadly, if not more.
I'm actually so glad that ED, unlike so many other sci-fi creations, avoids the trope of black holes being space vacuums that suck everything in. They don't. No more than all other massive bodies.
Things could be different for supermassive black holes, though. That's where time dilation and such might start playing a bigger role for even a ship passing at a safe distance. Would be nice to see at least Sagittarius A* behave in a unique way, for sure.
I'm actually so glad that ED, unlike so many other sci-fi creations, avoids the trope of black holes being space vacuums that suck everything in. They don't. No more than all other massive bodies.
Things could be different for supermassive black holes, though. That's where time dilation and such might start playing a bigger role for even a ship passing at a safe distance. Would be nice to see at least Sagittarius A* behave in a unique way, for sure.
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Oh I agree entirely, a BH with the mass of our sun would be no more dangerous to a spaceship than the sun itself is at the same distance, the thing is we are talking about getting close, really close, and that changes things, as you get close the gravity gradient and tidal forces increase and trying to do a fast loop around a black hole would likely tear a ship apart if you got close enough, but right now you can just cruise up at 30kps until you hit the exclusion zone and site there in normal space as if the BH didn't even exist.
Effectively, if you fly straight at a black hole your ship should be destroyed once you get close enough.
My point is that the same would happen if you fly too close to a star. Nowadays, we're only allowed to get as close to a star so that its radiation only slightly overloads an average ship's cooling system. At the same mass/distance ratio a black hole would arguably be even less dangerous because it emits less radiation overall and the gravity effects would be exactly the same (as in, mostly negligible).
Bottom line, if we want to get rid of black holes' exclusion zones, there's nothing to justify keeping those for regular stars. And then, yeah, the "rescue rangers" argument kicks in. If there were a permadeath mode then getting rid of all exclusion zones (including allowing anyone to happily burn down in thick planetary atmospheres) would've been one way to facilitate such death. Otherwise, we might still want to leave the explanation that our character was somehow saved from the brink of death at least a bit plausible.
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Well yes there is, a star doesn't have a surface, it's just gas, and the interior of the star likely isn't modeled so the point of the exclusion zone stopping players from getting to assets that aren't modeled still stands. Exclusion zones for planets were introduced after some players flew down to the surface early in the game when there was no planetary landing and found just low quality bitmaps and no surface, so having an exclusion zone closer to the star wouldn't be an issue, it's just there to stop players in specially designed ships managing to pass right through the surface and into the interior of the star, they would just stop at the point where the heat was so high they wouldn't last very long. Black Holes would also still have en exclusion zone for the same reason, but if you reach it you basically aren't getting out.
I am all for these things being more dangerous, heading out into the big black shouldn't be the walk in the park that it is now, but it also shouldn't be so dangerous that an experienced and properly equipped CMDR and ship wouldn't be able to survive out there, sort of like combat where a brand new player in an unengineered ship trying to take on a CZ would have trouble, but a bit of experience and work on the ship will see him get through fine.
Basically deep space exploration shouldn't be "easy" but also shouldn't be impossible, and a few dangers out there wouldn't hurt.
Again, same can be said about black holes: the exclusion zone is there to prevent players from getting into the area where they're about to experience some unique FXs that are simply not in the game - either because the devs didn't plan to create them or because they can't be created. For instance, time dilation is impossible to simulate in a real-time multiplayer game, therefore, we wouldn't be allowed to dive deep enough into a black hole's gravity well for relativistic effects to become noticeable. That is, way before we start getting some real physical damage due to the gravity gradient.
Time dilation isn't an issue in the Elite Galaxy, in case you hadn't noticed time isn't actually represented in the galaxy except as a personal experience, there's no spacetime, no relativity, just space!
But that's all just semantics anyway, black holes should be dangerous if you get to close, that's the only thing we are dealing with here and arguments to the contrary is exactly why everything in the galaxy gets nerfed to harmlessness to pamper part time explorers.
Just wipe any CMDRs account, if she/he gets too close to a BH. No way back. Then place a free Anaconda just outside the Schwarzschild radius. I guarantee that I will be there gazing at the "hopeful".
Nor relative motion of stars, or gravitational pull of any celestial objects beyond Horizons-level simulation, or most of Newtonian mechanics ... Sure.
It's just that simply dying when getting too close to a black hole, the very object famous for its relativistic effects, without experiencing those effects would be incredibly dull. If we want black holes to be interesting, they have to feel like actual black holes. To make them a source of sudden instant death simply because public consciousness perceives them as uniquely dangerous wouldn't add anything to the game's atmosphere and immersion.
And it's wrong to single them out among all other celestial bodies simply because the "black holes scary" trope is so ubiquitous. I can relate to the argument of making all bodies (or at least all central/stellar bodies) more challenging for explorers though.
But the argument via immersion-breaking about introducing sorts of dangers our commanders couldn't realistically escape from in a pod still stands. If we want this kind of danger, we need permadeath.
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That's the point you were making though, that it's a non-starter because of the fear of alienating casual players. The question then (and this applies to normal stars too potentially) is can you make it fit into, e.g. the "opt-in" philosophy that seems to pervade the game. Play off an incentive vs. hazard, in a way that requires a knowing opt-in. Neutron stars sort of do this now, and they're considered a positive in the game (and their treacherous dwarf brothers are accepted despite having a much worse risk-reward balance).