It would be a cool addition to elite if planets had weather cycles and different conditions, e.g. storms, rain, clouds, fog as opposed to just clear space all the time. If planets had weather it could make for some added challenge when trying to execute planetary missions in Odessey and could have different ship landing conditions depending on the weather, such as strong winds that move the ship and make it harder to land.
General Planet Weather
- Thread starter BackToRank1
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It would indeed and hopefully that will come when we get planets with a thick enough atmosphere to support weather that is powerful enough to affect us. The ones we have now are too close to a vacuum for that.
Yeah, we get light breezes and small dust clouds, but the atmospheric pressure needed to support clouds, hence rain, snow and other weather effects is greater that the current crops of atmospheric planets have. Mind you we used to get some crater fogs in really deep craters in old Horizons way back....pity they mostly went away.
By "weather", we should not only think about clouds, or rain, or whatever we are used to on our thick atmosphere planet.
Many landable planet could have high wind speeds, and even if atmospheric pressure is low, they could really affect ships while diving down, and storms could carry clouds of sand (or other small particles) which could impair our vision while diving down, influence stability of the thrusters, maybe add some hull damage due to colliding with those small particles at high speeds.
This would also lay the groundwork for thick atmospheric planets, for adding more advanced dynamic effects later.
Don't think of clouds or fog or rain yet, that requires wet planets, and all landable planets are either frozen dry, or cooked dry, in the end: They are dry. OTOH, there may be gases on some planets which are liquid at some temperatures, like "metallic rain" or "methane rain". But I think that's too complex as a first implementation: Such planets would be pretty devastating to the ship, SRV or suit anyways. And on such planets, we should have puddles or ponds of liquids already - which we don't have. So let's keep it "simple" as a start.
I really like the idea of such "weather effects" (sand storms, lightning, ...) would affect planetary missions - and I'd really prefer it to affect both approach by ship, SRV driving, and on-foot. It would be a really great addition to make exploring more challenging and varied. And if we could observe some of those effects from space (think like "huge sandstorm") we could plan our approach better and not just land somewhere more or less randomly.
Later, thick atmospheres would bring devastating storms of small rocks. really damaging your ship, creating scary sound effects of impacts, you get the idea.
BTW: If we'd get terrestrial landable planets at some point, I wouldn't mind if this "landing approach" would consist of just an auto-guided corridor down to a hangar, and we could visit and explore a small part of a city (I wonder if the bars would sell beer there
). It would make sense that it wouldn't be allowed to free-flight a densely populated planet and only allow auto-landing corridors.
Many landable planet could have high wind speeds, and even if atmospheric pressure is low, they could really affect ships while diving down, and storms could carry clouds of sand (or other small particles) which could impair our vision while diving down, influence stability of the thrusters, maybe add some hull damage due to colliding with those small particles at high speeds.
This would also lay the groundwork for thick atmospheric planets, for adding more advanced dynamic effects later.
Don't think of clouds or fog or rain yet, that requires wet planets, and all landable planets are either frozen dry, or cooked dry, in the end: They are dry. OTOH, there may be gases on some planets which are liquid at some temperatures, like "metallic rain" or "methane rain". But I think that's too complex as a first implementation: Such planets would be pretty devastating to the ship, SRV or suit anyways. And on such planets, we should have puddles or ponds of liquids already - which we don't have. So let's keep it "simple" as a start.
I really like the idea of such "weather effects" (sand storms, lightning, ...) would affect planetary missions - and I'd really prefer it to affect both approach by ship, SRV driving, and on-foot. It would be a really great addition to make exploring more challenging and varied. And if we could observe some of those effects from space (think like "huge sandstorm") we could plan our approach better and not just land somewhere more or less randomly.
Later, thick atmospheres would bring devastating storms of small rocks. really damaging your ship, creating scary sound effects of impacts, you get the idea.
BTW: If we'd get terrestrial landable planets at some point, I wouldn't mind if this "landing approach" would consist of just an auto-guided corridor down to a hangar, and we could visit and explore a small part of a city (I wonder if the bars would sell beer there
). It would make sense that it wouldn't be allowed to free-flight a densely populated planet and only allow auto-landing corridors.Well, Mars at least has a weather cycle of hiding the planet in a quite uniform, planet-wide cloud of sand storms on a regular basis. And it probably has snow falling at the poles on a regular basis, made of frozen carbon dioxide. So, low pressure atmospheres can support such weather effects.
Yes they could but with no pressure to speak of they would have the impact of a gentle breeze on Earth.
at re entry speeds?
dust maybe
damage through the shields that block multicannon shells
Lets
But Mars atmosphere is thicker than most if not all landable bodies and while it may be called a sand storm it is much more likely to be dust which is much lighter.I really like the idea of such "weather effects" (sand storms, lightning, ...) would affect planetary missions - and I'd really prefer it to affect both approach by ship, SRV driving, and on-foot. It would be a really great addition to make exploring more challenging and varied. And if we could observe some of those effects from space (think like "huge sandstorm") we could plan our approach better and not just land somewhere more or less randomly.
Later, thick atmospheres would bring devastating storms of small rocks. really damaging your ship, creating scary sound effects of impacts, you get the idea.
BTW: If we'd get terrestrial landable planets at some point, I wouldn't mind if this "landing approach" would consist of just an auto-guided corridor down to a hangar, and we could visit and explore a small part of a city (I wonder if the bars would sell beer there
Well, Mars at least has a weather cycle of hiding the planet in a quite uniform, planet-wide cloud of sand storms on a regular basis. And it probably has snow falling at the poles on a regular basis, made of frozen carbon dioxide. So, low pressure atmospheres can support such weather effects.
Which at the surface is almost invisible as demonstrated by our robotic probes, and as for wind pressure and blown stones, they don't damage the solar collectors of the robotic probes because that doesn't happen, they get dusty at best which reduces their effectiveness, that's about the only affect the dust storms on mars have on our probes, some dust.
Planet Weather actually sounds like a game Frontier would make. Some kind of Godsim maybe?
Based on ideas inspired by Ben Bova’s novel rather than the book in The Changes trilogy.
Can't say I've read either. Can't find the time to read anything anymore.
This is all true, still it could make landing a little more challenging and varied. Currently, if you've seen one planet, you've seen most. There are exceptions of beautifully unique vistas over valleys in nice atmospheric lights, I've seen that, I enjoy that, I like exploring. But we could really need some more variations.
Even if a high-velocity low-pressure dust storm doesn't do any harm and feels like a breeze, it should have some impact on behavior while diving down into an atmosphere, like shaking the ship a little, playing some audio samples so you can hear how the dust sands off your paintjob, impacting view, and of course this should impact the SRV in similar ways.
Currently, the biggest impact we can have on view is a planet that's pitch black - that's it.
And yes, maybe bring back crater fogs. At least, there's a small dust devil every now and then. They are small, could be bigger in rare occassions. And sometimes I see really small dust clouds at fixed positions: Why not on a much bigger scale and moving across the planet surface? We know there's wind on such planets because the flora bobs back and forth in that wind (and maybe it shouldn't because "low pressure").
Well, physic effects aren't shared between players anyways... E.g., if an SRV is destroyed in a settlement raid, a detached wheel may roll and bump along for one player but for other players, there's simply no such wheel, or go to a completely different direction. Area effects could be handled in a similar way: share location and bounding box with other players but render independently per user.