No sense of scale with planets?

Krepose Gavayne

Krepose Gavayne
I don't know about you, but I have difficulty comprehending the scale of some of the stars and planets I visit. Sometimes the gravity or exclusion zone lines help, and having other bodies in the vicinity certainly does, but usually it's just the distance value on the HUD/target panel which gives a clue. Unfortunately that ends up being little more than a simple number to me most of the time, as I have no frame of reference to gauge it by.

Well, I have just stumbled across some videos on YT which were real eye-openers for me, so I thought I'd share them for anyone else who was ignorant of their existence like I was previously. They're by someone using the monicker 'yeti dynamics'.

Here's one example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBDZtt0vWD8

Wow... just, wow!
 

Rall

Rall
Planetary landing if they get implemented will help with this, once you can get up and personal with a body the sheer size of these things will become more apparent. One of my first missions once plantary landings arive if they allow it, will be visiting the Moon and looking up at the Earth from it's surface. I'll probably try and find the Apollo landing sites, there may be an easter egg waiting for us.
 
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Midnight_Sun323

Midnight_Sun323
Take a visit to Azeban (sp?) orbital. It has the tightest orbit I've see with a station. The planet really does feel enormous. Even more so with a rift.
 

Vandal71

Vandal71
I have always thought that the star ports should be MUCH closer to the planets. There are some outposts out there that are a lot closer and they look really cool.
 
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JeffRyan

JeffRyan
I imagine in space it is difficult to have a decent sense of scale. There are so few reference points that would make sense to the human brain. A good example of this is we really don't appreciate how big our ships are.
 

talshiarr

talshiarr
We're used to seeing images from stations like the ISS which is only a few hundred km above earth, and no station in Elite at the moment is anywhere near that close. You can manually fly down after the auto supercruise drop and the scale gets much more apparent, I think I got to within 200 km or so of one tiny moon before I hit the body exclusion limit and the curvature was very small. Also, the speeds we fly around at make even colossal stars seem tiny, but if you want scale, fly out to Betelgeuse and watch as even 10c makes it feel like you're barely crawling around it.
 

matlars

M
Rlee said:
I have always thought that the star ports should be MUCH closer to the planets. There are some outposts out there that are a lot closer and they look really cool.
Click to expand...

I thought so too. Would be so cool to dock at a really big starport hanging just over the surface of some planet. But I guess from a reality pont of view, it would make more sense to put a port further away from a planet surface in the lagrangian point to not have to use energy to stop if from falling down.
 

Morbad

Morbad
JeffRyan said:
I imagine in space it is difficult to have a decent sense of scale. There are so few reference points that would make sense to the human brain. A good example of this is we really don't appreciate how big our ships are.
Click to expand...

My FDL is the size of a mega yacht and I am acutely aware of this fact.

A Sidewinder is nearly as large as the house I was raised in.
 
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Zenith

Zenith
I've seen a ringed gas giant with a shepherd moon skimming the outside edge of the ring. You could actually see it moving along if you just sat there.
Skimming a ring system in low supercruise helps to get an idea of scale of the rings to the planet.

I've fuel skimmed a red hypergiant (KY Cygni) at a distance comparable to the orbit of Saturn from the Sun. I stepped back to the equivalent distance of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto and it was still noticeably a ball as opposed to a point of light.

Scale is there, but you need the reference points like the distance in ls or relative motion.
 

Archvillain

Archvillain
The hyper-relativistic speeds necessary for gameplay in a star system is a big part of what is messing with the sense of scale. I think another aspect is that the speed-varying-by-distance nature of supercruise (also necessary) creates something akin to a forced-perspective illusion - giving the impression that you're travelling at a steady speed and the objects are much smaller than they are.

I wonder what it might look like if supercruise changed speed in "gear-shifts" or more noticeable increments, rather than smooth variation? It would probably be less fun, but might be able to reduce the scale illusion.

it's a difficult problem to reconcile that kind of massive scale with small-scale gameplay and not have our brain interpret everything as smaller scale.
 
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