Novae and Supernovae - Can we have some please FDEV?

Chaparral

Chaparral
I think the Milky Way gets about 50 Novae/year and 1 Supernovae/50 years.

These might constitute tourist attractions, material harvesting bonanzas, or neato dangerous events.

Would be cool if they would cause frameshift anomalies as well.

I imagine there might me some organics that would flock to these events to scoop up rich clouds of gunk.

What do you say FDEV? How about a bit more dangerousness? Blow up some stars.
 

PavelKCZ

PavelKCZ
Maybe they already did it. But...

If some Nova exploded 2000 ly from Colonia, we will see the explosion after 2000 years. And players in the Bubble will see the same after maybe 24.000 years or 20.000 years (depends on position of Nova).

And when it comes to Supernova, maybe FD will arrange something like this during next fifty years. But again, it can take another 1000 or 50.000 years until the whole thing will be visible from Bubble :)
 

Backelaer

Backelaer
Well if you're static, yes. But we're not. We can travel. So we could go towards the nova if we got a hint that there was one or even spot one in the distance. Which would be interesting in itself: if you spot one when flying around, how would you know how far it is? Could be interesting.
Time wouldn't be an issue, because supernovas go on for weeks I believe. Not so sure about regular novas though.
And you would never be able to reach the system it occured in itself, as there wouldn't be a star left to jump into.
 

Lightspeed

Lightspeed
Personally, I'd rather they spent time on something else, such as aurorae on planets. But that's probably a lot of work too.
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
The ED universe is essentially frozen in stone. Stars remain at exactly the same luminosity, they never vary (unlike in the real world, where most stars are variable to some degree) and they can never explode. The nature of the Stellar Forge requires this.

FD can edit the stars, but they can't do that while the game is live. So the best - the absolute best - you could hope for is an announcement that a certain star will blow up on Thursday at 0700. Thursday 0700 rolls around, the servers go offline, and when they come back online 20 minutes later, we can all say "hey lookit that, the star's done gone exploded". But you won't be able to see anything.

Not that you'd "see anything" in a real-time supernova event anyway. You'd be sitting there, watching a perfectly normal-looking giant star. Suddenly the shockwave hits you, and your eyeballs won't have time to react to anything in the tiny fraction of a second you will get before your eyeballs, along with the rest of you and your ship, get vaporized and become part of that expanding shockwave. So, visually, it would be no different to an irrecoverable server crash.

As for visiting a supernova remnant, you wouldn't really want to be visiting one in the months immediately following the event - too much radiation and debris; the whole system would be like trying to fly inside the jet cone of a neutron star. Once things calm down and the remnant settles down into behaving like a "regular" neutron star or black hole, there wouldn't really be anything new, odd or strange to find there that you couldn't also find in a regular "old" neutron star or black hole system.

TLDR: if you want a game universe where such dynamic events are possible, they'd pretty much have to demolish ED and redesign it from the ground up to allow it.
 

DNA-Decay

DNA-Decay
Yeah, Lets have a supernova at Sag A that lasts a month.
Then folks can travel to dufferent places to watch it again and again.
And in 28,000 years it will reach sol and be visible around the bubble.

(space legs for sure by then)
 

LordFerret

LordFerret
Well I'm sure this has been suggested a gazillion times on these forums already; How about worm holes? One-way worm holes at that. FDev can scatter them about, don't even tell people where they are or lead to... that would be discovered quickly enough. Think Interstellar.

Since we're asking; I'd like to see the 'witching' screen be done away with. Surely the star field during a jump could be displayed as easily as one slews through the galaxy map, no? Anyone who has ever tinkered with Celestia knows what I speak of. That would be very cool, IMO. :cool:
 

Chaparral

Chaparral
Sapyx said:
The ED universe is essentially frozen in stone. Stars remain at exactly the same luminosity, they never vary (unlike in the real world, where most stars are variable to some degree) and they can never explode. The nature of the Stellar Forge requires this.

FD can edit the stars, but they can't do that while the game is live. So the best - the absolute best - you could hope for is an announcement that a certain star will blow up on Thursday at 0700. Thursday 0700 rolls around, the servers go offline, and when they come back online 20 minutes later, we can all say "hey lookit that, the star's done gone exploded". But you won't be able to see anything.

Not that you'd "see anything" in a real-time supernova event anyway. You'd be sitting there, watching a perfectly normal-looking giant star. Suddenly the shockwave hits you, and your eyeballs won't have time to react to anything in the tiny fraction of a second you will get before your eyeballs, along with the rest of you and your ship, get vaporized and become part of that expanding shockwave. So, visually, it would be no different to an irrecoverable server crash.

As for visiting a supernova remnant, you wouldn't really want to be visiting one in the months immediately following the event - too much radiation and debris; the whole system would be like trying to fly inside the jet cone of a neutron star. Once things calm down and the remnant settles down into behaving like a "regular" neutron star or black hole, there wouldn't really be anything new, odd or strange to find there that you couldn't also find in a regular "old" neutron star or black hole system.

TLDR: if you want a game universe where such dynamic events are possible, they'd pretty much have to demolish ED and redesign it from the ground up to allow it.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure our magic radiation protection that allows us to fly through neutron star poles would protect us, but there could be dense nebula with mat rich asteroid fields, notable stellar phen, etc...
 

WR3ND

WR3ND
They already use a time factor for PG for the locations of bodies in a system and the like. What they don't have it seems, at least without manual implementation, is causality.

These events might be rare enough that they could set something up. Similarly with intermittent accretion disk systems and the like.

Would certainly make the galaxy a bit more interesting.

As for the other concerns, everything is live in the galaxy viewed from everywhere else in the game. No need to be pedantic about it. :p Sure, I wouldn't mind traveling a few thousand light-years further away from the Crab Nebula to watch when it went supernova, but the game doesn't work that way.
 
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Maolagin

M
Sapyx said:
The ED universe is essentially frozen in stone. Stars remain at exactly the same luminosity, they never vary (unlike in the real world, where most stars are variable to some degree) and they can never explode. The nature of the Stellar Forge requires this.

FD can edit the stars, but they can't do that while the game is live. So the best - the absolute best - you could hope for is an announcement that a certain star will blow up on Thursday at 0700. Thursday 0700 rolls around, the servers go offline, and when they come back online 20 minutes later, we can all say "hey lookit that, the star's done gone exploded". But you won't be able to see anything.
Click to expand...
It is true that, as far as we know, a supernova could only occur at the Thursday tick. It is probably also true that what you see in the night sky from other systems can only change weekly. However, there's no particular reason to think that the result in the nova system would necessarily be static. The moving jets from NS and WDs show that the game supports stars as animated, dynamic assets. In the case of a supernova you'd have an expanding remnant instead of an oscillating jet, but that seems like a mere technicality. Now I don't know if more serious changes would be needed to make the exclusion zone expand dynamically, or for the drop point to move outward. But making the phenomenon visually animated seems straightforward.

Sapyx said:
Not that you'd "see anything" in a real-time supernova event anyway. You'd be sitting there, watching a perfectly normal-looking giant star. Suddenly the shockwave hits you, and your eyeballs won't have time to react to anything in the tiny fraction of a second you will get before your eyeballs, along with the rest of you and your ship, get vaporized and become part of that expanding shockwave. So, visually, it would be no different to an irrecoverable server crash.
Click to expand...
Hardly. The actual sequence of events for a core-collapse supernova is roughly this:

  1. At T=0, the core of the star collapses to form a proto-neutron star. It takes a second or so for an Earth-sized billion-degree ball of iron plasma to reconfigure itself into a city-sized trillion-degree ball of neutrons, but other than a burst of neutrinos and some weak gravity waves flying outward at the speed of light, there's nothing for an outside observer to detect yet.
  2. The outer layers of the core fall inward before rebounding off the surface of the new neutron star, producing a shock wave moving outward through the star. Typically this happens at the center of a supergiant, so it takes up to an hour for the shock to break through to the surface. At that point there would be a brilliant flash of light ranging up to X-ray frequencies. More info here: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/K...rst-time-the-early-flash-of-an-exploding-star
  3. Depending on the progenitor star, the shock breakout is going to be anywhere from 10^4-10^6 times solar luminosity, and will last from under a minute to tens of minutes. Toasty for sure, but anything close enough to care was probably already cooked to a crisp by spending thousands of years orbiting an expanding supergiant. Since our ships and pilots can survive fuel scooping O-class stars, they can certainly survive viewing this from a few AU away.
  4. The former star is now considered "ejecta" expanding at a few tens of Mm/s, 0.05c at very most. This is comically slow compared to our ships of course - something like a couple of hours per AU. You could easily make a week-long event out of the ejecta cloud "gradually" expanding to fill the system and engulf everything in it.
  5. The actual "shock wave" front advances faster than that, perhaps up to 0.1c, but it's just a sudden change in the plasma properties of the solar wind, and with everything else going on you might not notice it.
  6. After a few days the ejecta no longer emits much light, as essentially all of its energy is in its outward momentum, the photons from the core explosion are still diffusing their way through, and the processes that will convert that kinetic energy back into radiation haven't kicked in yet. Don't make the mistake of flying into it though. Even though much less dense than air, a stream of plasma moving a few percent of light speed will still be bad for your health.
  7. In a few weeks the real light show will begin. At the edges of the bubble, the shock waves will start lighting up with various kinds of emission. And within the ejecta, radioactive elements will start to make it glow with decay heat. But FDev can still wait until after the 2020 update to figure out if and how to update the skybox, since it will still be months or years before the light from the explosion reaches the next nearest star system. It will also be several months before the ejecta becomes transparent enough to be able to see the central neutron star.
In short, I see no particular reason why FDev couldn't implement a credible supernova effect in short order. It would mainly just be some visual effects combined with a slowly-expanding exclusion zone. After the first week they might as well disable jumping into the system. Requires some hand-editing of system properties, and a good deal of work from the visual effects folks, but no fundamentally new technology. Dubiously a good use of developer time, but probably technically feasible.
 

WR3ND

WR3ND
Courier 6 said:
jumps into system
Is that star getting bigger?
HEAT LEVELS CRITICAL
rebuy screen
Click to expand...
I've jumped through stars in between very close binary stars a few times, getting rather toasty fuel scooping. So, kind of par for the course, really, though no need for a rebuy.

Never mind that our ships are much faster than expanding supernovae in supercruise anyway. :giggle:
 
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[VR] Goooost

[VR] Goooost
PavelKCZ said:
Maybe they already did it. But...

If some Nova exploded 2000 ly from Colonia, we will see the explosion after 2000 years. And players in the Bubble will see the same after maybe 24.000 years or 20.000 years (depends on position of Nova).

And when it comes to Supernova, maybe FD will arrange something like this during next fifty years. But again, it can take another 1000 or 50.000 years until the whole thing will be visible from Bubble :)
Click to expand...

None of that logic makes sense in terms of this game. Players wouldnt understand not being able to see something until they jumped into its light range. It wouldn't make sense to do it to one object in the galaxy and not others. It opens a can of worms. I think you're only mentioning it because you think supernovas in the game would be stupid. I'd like to hear your reasoning why.
 

WR3ND

WR3ND
On the other hand, they haven't been able to fix the galactic stellar cubes yet, which are quite a bit more jarring in their own, less than ideal way, so... yeah.

Lowered expectations. :(
 

Chaparral

Chaparral
Maolagin said:
It is true that, as far as we know, a supernova could only occur at the Thursday tick. It is probably also true that what you see in the night sky from other systems can only change weekly. However, there's no particular reason to think that the result in the nova system would necessarily be static. The moving jets from NS and WDs show that the game supports stars as animated, dynamic assets. In the case of a supernova you'd have an expanding remnant instead of an oscillating jet, but that seems like a mere technicality. Now I don't know if more serious changes would be needed to make the exclusion zone expand dynamically, or for the drop point to move outward. But making the phenomenon visually animated seems straightforward.


Hardly. The actual sequence of events for a core-collapse supernova is roughly this:

  1. At T=0, the core of the star collapses to form a proto-neutron star. It takes a second or so for an Earth-sized billion-degree ball of iron plasma to reconfigure itself into a city-sized trillion-degree ball of neutrons, but other than a burst of neutrinos and some weak gravity waves flying outward at the speed of light, there's nothing for an outside observer to detect yet.
  2. The outer layers of the core fall inward before rebounding off the surface of the new neutron star, producing a shock wave moving outward through the star. Typically this happens at the center of a supergiant, so it takes up to an hour for the shock to break through to the surface. At that point there would be a brilliant flash of light ranging up to X-ray frequencies. More info here: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/K...rst-time-the-early-flash-of-an-exploding-star
  3. Depending on the progenitor star, the shock breakout is going to be anywhere from 10^4-10^6 times solar luminosity, and will last from under a minute to tens of minutes. Toasty for sure, but anything close enough to care was probably already cooked to a crisp by spending thousands of years orbiting an expanding supergiant. Since our ships and pilots can survive fuel scooping O-class stars, they can certainly survive viewing this from a few AU away.
  4. The former star is now considered "ejecta" expanding at a few tens of Mm/s, 0.05c at very most. This is comically slow compared to our ships of course - something like a couple of hours per AU. You could easily make a week-long event out of the ejecta cloud "gradually" expanding to fill the system and engulf everything in it.
  5. The actual "shock wave" front advances faster than that, perhaps up to 0.1c, but it's just a sudden change in the plasma properties of the solar wind, and with everything else going on you might not notice it.
  6. After a few days the ejecta no longer emits much light, as essentially all of its energy is in its outward momentum, the photons from the core explosion are still diffusing their way through, and the processes that will convert that kinetic energy back into radiation haven't kicked in yet. Don't make the mistake of flying into it though. Even though much less dense than air, a stream of plasma moving a few percent of light speed will still be bad for your health.
  7. In a few weeks the real light show will begin. At the edges of the bubble, the shock waves will start lighting up with various kinds of emission. And within the ejecta, radioactive elements will start to make it glow with decay heat. But FDev can still wait until after the 2020 update to figure out if and how to update the skybox, since it will still be months or years before the light from the explosion reaches the next nearest star system. It will also be several months before the ejecta becomes transparent enough to be able to see the central neutron star.
In short, I see no particular reason why FDev couldn't implement a credible supernova effect in short order. It would mainly just be some visual effects combined with a slowly-expanding exclusion zone. After the first week they might as well disable jumping into the system. Requires some hand-editing of system properties, and a good deal of work from the visual effects folks, but no fundamentally new technology. Dubiously a good use of developer time, but probably technically feasible.
Click to expand...
Well dang this sound flipping amazing! +1 (because that is all I can give) Now I want this in the game more than ever.
 

PavelKCZ

PavelKCZ
Goooost said:
None of that logic makes sense in terms of this game. Players wouldnt understand not being able to see something until they jumped into its light range. It wouldn't make sense to do it to one object in the galaxy and not others. It opens a can of worms. I think you're only mentioning it because you think supernovas in the game would be stupid. I'd like to hear your reasoning why.
Click to expand...

I do not think that supernova in the game would be stupid. I am only saying that implement it in some "game way" would be stupid and totally unrealistic.

1. Speed of light is constant. Yes, ships can move faster than light in SC, but the light from nova cannot.
2. If it is technically possible (I do not know) to vary the size and intensity of some particular star in realtime on the server side, I suppose that there is no way how to delay the visibility of this effect from one system to another. So, if someone at FD suddenly rise the size and intensity of some star, all players will see this in the same time - totally destroying the sense of the size of the galaxy, because the change will be visible from Beagle Point, from Colonia, from Sol etc. at the same time.

and after that ? What gameplay will be behind this whole thing ? Just to travel in the direction of bigger light and back ?
 

PavelKCZ

PavelKCZ
Or I can imagine that firstly there will be an article on GalNet that star XYZ will change into nova soon and there will be some community effort like evacuation of the system and nearby systems around - basically a lot of passenger missions from A to B and after month or so, there will be one bright star which will be seen from all places at the same moment.
Also not so interesting gameplay IMHO.
 

Gully Foyle

Gully Foyle
Randomly seed the galaxy with stars approaching their end and show weeks until timers on the map. No one know what happens, let alone exactly when.
Nova neutron red or white dwarf.


If you're too close ..... hello rebuy.
 
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