I agree also.
I think a lot of this is due to a lack of familiar reference objects to frame your ships against. Outside of stations, there isn't a great deal of material to compare your vast interstellar space machines to, except for the actual vastness of space itself, and a backdrop of
infinity is a difficult thing to feel large against. I've even started noticing also that after a while, it gets easier and easier to look at
stars as being something that are easily traversed, which muddies the whole scale thing even further. It's hard to appreciate the true size of a gigantic ball of burningness when you can run a lap around it in a few seconds while you're pilfering space fuel from it.
The only things i've seen that can help with scale thus far are the trucks in stations, staircases (hey, this internal bay is actually HUGE), and the windows in control towers. Everything else is just too foreign to use as a reference.
This highlights (to me) one of the two biggest missing puzzle pieces where
visual immersion is concerned; there's no
clutter. No barrels. No cars (aside from the single manufactured yellow truck - the maker of which must be VERY well off). No teeny robots scooting around picking up the ludicrously common amounts of debris from destroyed ships (parking officers in the Elite universe are
homicidal 
), no piles of random equipment a few pixels across, no bananas, no chairs and tables. There's even a conspicuous absence of the one great video game scale framing tool - the humble crate. It's space - stations have
bajillions of tonnes of produce on sale, there should be crates everywhere.
"Excuse me sir, where are all the crates of food capsules I ordered?"
"They're difficult to render, citizen. Now move along. Also, that's a 200 credit fine for loitering"
The SECOND missing piece of the immersion puzzle, IMHO, is people. I know life is incredibly cheap in the future, but my internal reasoning of everyone cowering under tables for fear of getting a parking ticket and being executed is stretching pretty thin.
Those landing towers should be manned. Even 2D sprites would work. There should be people on walkways in the big stations, or clinging to towers on outposts in EVA suits. With the amount of bureaucracy involved in the running of a station, there should be a person with a clipboard and a frantic expression on their face every 200 pixels. There should be people
everywhere on the surface of planets, even the airless ones (although if that happened, i'm guessing the game would become Grand Theft Auto - ELITE in about 0.6 seconds after you first spatter a pedestrian across your windscreen). Heck, in Imperial space especially there should be slaves working with those glowing batons to help guide your ship onto the pad. I say slaves, because if some of my early landings are anything to go by, you couldn't pay someone enough in the federation to get in the way of your average pilot.
Also, being able to walk around in your ship would be fantastic. I'm guessing the first time someone got lost in their Anaconda while being interdicted and trying to find the bridge would be a good way to establish the scale of your vessels.
![[VR] Frank_G](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/59/59394.jpg?1553527111){kind=avatar}
