General Visual effects improvements

[DavidMik]

Amidst all the optimization, general bugs and balancing conversations going on, I felt a nice laid back discussion on how certain visual effects could be improved would be nice.
I’ll start with a couple long-standing ones:

1. Give us event horizons back! Bonus points for taking into account spin and getting more doughnut-like black holes.
2. Cap neutron jet speed and instead ramp up energy in the form of brightness (relativistic beaming comes into play as well, so brighter when facing an oncoming jet, dimmer when looking at a jet moving away) and potentially quicker charge times for fast spinning neutron stars so there’s no more spastic FTL jets

 

[varonica]

1. Cap neutron jet speed and instead ramp up energy in the form of brightness (relativistic beaming comes into play as well, so brighter when facing an oncoming jet, dimmer when looking at a jet

Relativistic effect aren't a thing in FSD physics. Neutron jet speed is determined by the speed of rotation of the neutron star itself, some neutorn stars rotate at up to 60 times per second, so this is an effect of the game physics and real world physics and shouldn't be artificially capped, the speed of rotation of the star is determined by the Stellar Forge. This is how it is in the actual galaxy so lets not mess with the galaxy.

 

[DavidMik]

Relativistic effect aren't a thing in FSD physics. Neutron jet speed is determined by the speed of rotation of the neutron star itself, some neutorn stars rotate at up to 60 times per second, so this is an effect of the game physics and real world physics and shouldn't be artificially capped, the speed of rotation of the star is determined by the Stellar Forge. This is how it is in the actual galaxy so lets not mess with the galaxy.

My understanding of the game world is that true FTL does not exist, but workarounds involving hyperspace and warp bubble like solutions (inter and intra system travel respectively) do exist. Matter ejected from neutron stars doesn’t have an FSD to ferry it along obviously so it can’t break the speed of light. If a neutron star’s rotation and other sources of energy in the system would, under Newtonian circumstances, eject matter FTL then in actuality the jets would get close to the speed of light but undergo relativistic effects instead. Two things are necessary to fix it, first prevent the whole cone from moving at high speed (the flickering glitch which suggests matter moving FTL) and overall shifting some of that increased energy in the form of velocity to changes in brightness due to increased synchrotron emission near the speed of light. This is observed in reality. No jet can consist of any matter moving FTL.