The sheer scale of this game never cease to amaze me

So I decided to check out this rather big ice planet(20K km radius 2G) I came up on while exploring along the Carina-Sag Arm. I landed at the top of what looked like a medium sized crater and touched down at the edge.
Usually these planets are flat and featureless(this one no exception), but I spotted what looked like mountainous terrain way in the distance below me(at the bottom of the crater) and decided I wanted to check that out while gathering mats on the way.

8 hours later(including some fairly long breaks), over 100 km distance traveled down the treacherous crater slopes, with countless hills climbed or rolled over, valleys gone through and crossed over, tumbling down multiple steep slopes, lots repairs. Finally. After rolling over this final hill .. There it is, I still see the same mountainous terrain way in the distance below me :D

I love it.
 
Same with me. From the start and first supercruise flight. I always knew how big star systems are but come on... this was just mingblowing. I used to see mch more... compact star systems in games. Then horizons came and to this day I have fun driving down the craters with my srv. A little dot on the planet which few minutes later becaomes a huge hole in the ground and will take me an hour to drive down to the bottom. It's still amazing and I love it. Recently I landed on a planet with some huge canyons and drove my srv to the gentle slpe. Before I knew it it was too late to start breaking and I was fighting to stay alive along the way to the bottom (and I still loved the ride down). I lived but the bottom was so rocky and bumpy that I couldn't drive wnywhere. What saved me from losing my srv was flying it up and rolling it in the air with my joystick locked hard left roll and using the whole srv like a giant spinning wheel. Yeah it worked. No more canyons for me :D I need srv with bigger wheels. Big galaxy, big planets, bigger srv please.
 
So I decided to check out this rather big ice planet(20K km radius 2G) I came up on while exploring along the Carina-Sag Arm. I landed at the top of what looked like a medium sized crater and touched down at the edge.
Usually these planets are flat and featureless(this one no exception), but I spotted what looked like mountainous terrain way in the distance below me(at the bottom of the crater) and decided I wanted to check that out while gathering mats on the way.

8 hours later(including some fairly long breaks), over 100 km distance traveled down the treacherous crater slopes, with countless hills climbed or rolled over, valleys gone through and crossed over, tumbling down multiple steep slopes, lots repairs. Finally. After rolling over this final hill .. There it is, I still see the same mountainous terrain way in the distance below me :D

I love it.

Different planet but same g for me. Took a good 10 mins just to travel the 500m to get up to the ship.

Yeah the tyres could not get the grip they needed to overcome the slope at that gravity. Great fun.

:D
 
If you like scale and don't wanna travel too far I've got something for all of you:

Gienah A3, 154ly from sol, 19.000 km radius (yes, radius), earth has a radius of 6.300 km
GcCyTQS.jpg


Landing inside the crater seen in the middle of the screen above.
Still 62km until touchdown and the crater is already spanning all the way to the horizon.
Vjx1uMA.jpg


Curious if anyone can work out the size of this crater, must be huge.
 
You were driving steep slopes on an ice planet with 2G, really? Err, down ok. But up? :D
Got to admit I've never did that before. Maybe the higher gravity compensates the lower grip from the ice?
I really don't know, you tell me.

What you say about the scale, I know this feeling very well! It's amazing... :)

I actually find the High G planets easier to combat slopes due to the extra traction :).
 
Even small craters turn out to be huge on the human scale. One thing I love doing (I'm gonna run a Buckyball race on this at some point soon) is to land on the lip of a crater, deploy the SRV and then drive down off the edge, across the floor of the crater and up onto the little "nipple" mound that rises up in the center. These journeys often take around half and hour where it seemed like they would take minutes when viewing the scene from the air.

I strongly recommend everyone gives this a try - gives you a fresh and truly daunting perspective on the scale of things.
 
I recently landed on a medium sized rocky planet, because i always land at the end of a session while exploring. One of the bigger craters caught my attention from orbit and i approached it from open terrain at roughly 2 km altitude. A few kilometers before i reached the crater ridge, it already filled the horizon... But when i flew past the ridge, it was a true eye-opener... The crater was more than 20 km deep and several 100 km in diameter. I spent minutes descending into the shadowy depths along the unlit crater side. Features like this are always mindblowing, especially, when playing in VR... Depths perception adds so much to what seems to be only a few rocks on a monitor....

Edit: and i really wonder, how it will look and feel, once we can get out of the SRV and notice, that the little hill, the SRV jumped with ease, is actually massive and impassable terrain for a human...
 
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Curious if anyone can work out the size of this crater, must be huge.

On my screen planet is ~118 mm wide. Radius is 19kkm so diameter is 36kkm
Crater is ~7 mm wide (measured in the same axis as I measured the planet's width).

118 mm = 36.000 km
7 mm = x km

118x = 252.000 km

hence:
x = 2.135,59 km (+- ~110 km @ 5% error rate)
 
You were driving steep slopes on an ice planet with 2G, really? Err, down ok. But up? :D
Got to admit I've never did that before. Maybe the higher gravity compensates the lower grip from the ice?
I really don't know, you tell me.

That's the fun part. Figuring out a path to descend without sliding uncontrollably and perhaps ending up in an unstoppable tumble down the mountainside(i'm still working on that btw Thank god for instant premium repairs ;) ). Or finding a natural path up a hill that the SRV is able to climb.

I find I'm able to ascend at about a maximum of 20 deg without losing grip on this planet. And descending I found that turning the srv sideways makes for the best breaking. Hitting the breaks when you are about to lose traction going downwards is a big no no :eek:
 
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