That's my point, you can't tell how close you got to the planet. Planet surfaces tend to be fractals, and one of the properties of fractals is that they look the same independent of scale. Look at a real picture of an asteroid, how big is it? It could be the size of Texas or the size of a potato, you have no way of knowing.
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The canyon like features in the video could have been dried stream beds a few metres across or the grand canyon a few km across or the a rift valley hundreds of km across.
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So on the one hand we have the dev telling us the planets are to scale and thousands of kms across, on the other hand we have you saying the planets are not thousands of kms across based on your interpretation of the altitude above a planet approached in beta with no means to judge scale, that you admit might be wrong.
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I can see why people are sceptical.
I do say, we can't tell until we are at the surface, but they could let us there now really. But I don't think they would do that, mainly for the reasons I state, but we'll find out come Horizon. However, if there is a loading screen, then that will answer for sure what I expect is the case. I fully expect a loading screen something similar to the 'jump' now.