Cockpit glare on some dimmer stars.

[DroppDreadd]

Hi everyone!

i dont know is this is the right forum for this tipe of question, so sorry if its wrong.
i have a question for a while, i don't know if it's a bug of if its intended but everytime i go near a brown dwarf-level star, (even the most dim ones) i see a bright white glare from inside the cockpit, stronger than the star itself.

anyone else have this?

Examples:
imgur album with some other examples

[TorTorden]

I think those are supposed to be scratches in canopy glass.
For some weird reason that texture seems to be incredibly low resolution and looks atrocious.

[Roger Wilco Jr]

Yeah, I've been in systems with a neutron star or black hole, 100KLY away, and still get shadows and glare. I just have to assume that they have the galaxy modeled so bright that it is causing it. Really, it should probably be nearly pitch black, but that may be a little difficult for game play (not a simulation).

[thebs]

I think those are supposed to be scratches in canopy glass.

Indeed they are. Furthermore, the developers are attempting to re-create the Doppler shift. Purple light is an interesting case, especially dealing with refaction, and I -- being an engineer who loves physics -- love this attention to detail in the game.

I.e., some of the developers aren't just computer geeks and coders, they are physicists and engineers. They've managed to balance real physics in a vacuum with some Sci-Fi expectations that aren't quite accurate true (e.g., sound, inertia/momentum, etc...).

Sometimes they are limited to what OpenGL can offer, especially as they've moved to version 3.x in Horizons, and have yet to re-create some things, or otherwise code it for the improved Transformation & Lighting (T&L). But man it's fun to just look at things in the game and the little engineer in me goes ... "Yes! Yes! YES!!!"

For some weird reason that texture seems to be incredibly low resolution and looks atrocious.

I haven't looked too closely, but I cannot tell if it's actually a low resolution texture, or a more of a result of the Venetian blind effect. It's more than just your eyes, but the reality that even affects the spectrum, especially with the Doppler shift when refraction also involved, beyond just the edges in patterns.

Yeah, I've been in systems with a neutron star or black hole, 100KLY away, and still get shadows and glare. I just have to assume that they have the galaxy modeled so bright that it is causing it. Really, it should probably be nearly pitch black, but that may be a little difficult for game play (not a simulation).

But have you noticed why it's so difficult to see the stars until you pull away from the star after shifting in? Space is dark, very, very dark, so things become so bright ... even though it's dark. The attention to detail in this game is unreal, including the perspective of darkness and light, depending on your location.

These last two (2) aspects are why the one moon landing conspiracy theory I constantly have to debunk is why the white crosses appear behind the astronauts in the photos. Light and optics 101.

Beyond that, also keep in mind that a black hole doesn't "absorb" or "reduce" light.

A black hole, as we have theorized, only bends light ... or more accurately, gravity bends space & time, the light still travels in a straight-line, relatively. It's important to differentiate, and one of the first things I had to deal right after graduating is how GPS satellites, which provide time, have a clock that run slower -- significantly enough so that it can affect GPS-based avionics and guidance -- due these relative effects.

Inside the event horizon we get a point where it's bent into the singularity itself, so it doesn't return. But outside of that, we can get massive concentrations of light, especially near the event horizon, similarly to both low Earth orbit (LEO) but, more importantly, geosynchronous equatorial orbit (GEO). The movie Interstellar did an absolute excellent job of this in their rendering of Gargantua.

[Roger Wilco Jr]

@TheBS

I have noticed that the stars get brighter and more appear the farther you travel form the local sun, and I think it's pretty cool. I've wondered though if that is realistic. It seems more like a light pollution simulation, and is there enough particles in the "vacuum" of space to actually produce this effect? It doesn't seem so on a moonless night out in the country.

Anyway, in the game neutron stars and black holes don't seem to be modeled as light sources - at least not up close when you look at them. I've been in systems with a regular sun, traveled a very far way away, and the planets & ship become very dark. But then I've done the same in systems with neutron stars or black holes and the planets are still 1/2 lit 1/2 dark and the same with the ship. So I do think they have some lighting issues, although I suppose it could have been my graphics driver.

[TorTorden]

@TheBS

I have noticed that the stars get brighter and more appear the farther you travel form the local sun, and I think it's pretty cool. I've wondered though if that is realistic. It seems more like a light pollution simulation, and is there enough particles in the "vacuum" of space to actually produce this effect? It doesn't seem so on a moonless night out in the country.

Anyway, in the game neutron stars and black holes don't seem to be modeled as light sources - at least not up close when you look at them. I've been in systems with a regular sun, traveled a very far way away, and the planets & ship become very dark. But then I've done the same in systems with neutron stars or black holes and the planets are still 1/2 lit 1/2 dark and the same with the ship. So I do think they have some lighting issues, although I suppose it could have been my graphics driver.

I chalk it up to a protection/polarization effect on the cockpit/screen
Considering that if we where anywhere near that close to a sun we would be on fire without it.
(So its a bit odd we don't burn when the canopy blows)

As we move away from the sun the ship dials down on the protection.

As for sound I chalk that up to being an in-cockpit simulation to improve the situational awareness for the still human pilots.
(This actually goes away when the cockpit breaches)

As for the canopy scratches. I consider them low Res since they look as pixelated and blotchy as a vanilla minecraft texture.

[Roger Wilco Jr]

I chalk it up to a protection/polarization effect on the cockpit/screen
Considering that if we where anywhere near that close to a sun we would be on fire without it.
(So its a bit odd we don't burn when the canopy blows)

As we move away from the sun the ship dials down on the protection.

Yes, I originally had the same reasoning, until as you point out, when the cockpit blows you don't bet blinded. So that's why I was assuming it was light pollution or some such thing. Or maybe the vision protection is built into the helmet visor like a welder's mask? I wonder if it actually specifies it in one of the old manuals where they talked about life support? The world may never know the truth.


***edit
But why would it dim if you are pointing away from the star? Arggh!

PS. no mention of vision protection, other than from vacuum, in the manual.

[thebs]

@TheBS
I have noticed that the stars get brighter and more appear the farther you travel form the local sun, and I think it's pretty cool. I've wondered though if that is realistic. It seems more like a light pollution simulation, and is there enough particles in the "vacuum" of space to actually produce this effect? It doesn't seem so on a moonless night out in the country.

Particles (and air) aren't required for this, let alone your own pupils do similarly.

As I said ... too many things fall back to the classic, Greek Aristotle assumption of air being required ... when it actually doesn't. Photons exist in a vacuum, and act the same. They are just modified as they travel through a medium ... whether glass ... or air. Their but they still act the same. A medium is never, ever required.

Otherwise the Earth couldn't be warmed by the Sun. It's not trace gases between us and the Sun. Photons are photons are photons. They travel in a straight line. Mediums, and gravity, change their vectors, even split their signals. Heck, that's how we can figure out what different planets ... even suns ... are composed of, thanx to photons traveling through a medium at their origin, and then the long-distance, multi-year (and even thousands of years) vacuum of galactic, and even inter-galactic, space.

I chalk it up to a protection/polarization effect on the cockpit/screen
Considering that if we where anywhere near that close to a sun we would be on fire without it.
(So its a bit odd we don't burn when the canopy blows)
As we move away from the sun the ship dials down on the protection ...

Er ... maybe, but it doesn't matter if it's a visor, or the naked eye. More on that later, because to same following point ...

***edit
But why would it dim if you are pointing away from the star? Arggh!

But have you ever stood behind a floodlight? What happens?
And why do we like telescopes outside of cities? Why are the stars more visible in the country?
I mean ... guys, this is really basic stuff you can observe on your own, just looking up.

Any bright light "drowns out" dimmer lights. This would include when you're standing behind an extremely bright source, looking away. Just like when you are looking up at the stars in a city v. in the country. You don't need a light shining at you for there to be a difference.

The ambient illumination itself changes what is visible ... and what is not. The air may refract more, and distort because it's a medium (hence why the higher we can go with a telescope, the more "real picture" we get), but you don't need air at all for the ambient light to cause issues.

Yes, I originally had the same reasoning, until as you point out, when the cockpit blows you don't bet blinded. So that's why I was assuming it was light pollution or some such thing. Or maybe the vision protection is built into the helmet visor like a welder's mask? I wonder if it actually specifies it in one of the old manuals where they talked about life support? The world may never know the truth.
PS. no mention of vision protection, other than from vacuum, in the manual.

Er, um ... every astronaut helmet ever designed has numerous protections, period. Originally it had a slide down visor, but instantly polarizing visors were developed rather quickly. Heck, the USAF had to develop them before manned space flight, and the Mercury astronauts wore pressure suits from the USAF high altitude programs.

I mean, this is pretty much '50s technology, and commodity in space programs by the moon launch. Heck, even in the '90s they were both so commodity and so quick to transition, iron workers adopted them and could be looking right at the plasma torch when they fired them.

Whether it's a visor or the naked eye ... ambient light prevents one from seeing dimmer lights. You don't have to be looking a the sun at all. You can be facing away.

Also remember that in space, the temperature can close in on absolute zero, and be totally broiling in other cases. There's a reason why we don't just have solar panels, but their radiators, which aren't just for power, and why we need radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) when solar energy is infeasible (basically beyond Mars -- exponentially, 1/16th power when 4x the distance from the earth), mainly to keep spacecraft warm.

Rosetta-Philae was a perfect example, even though the media were complete bafoons. It's the one institution that utter lacks engineering knowledge. Trying to get that sucker to start up in the cold was worse than the power issues they had.

BTW ... another myth that is not true. Temperatures don't always get cooler the higher you go up in the Earth's atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Comp ... e_1962.svg

Anyway, in the game neutron stars and black holes don't seem to be modeled as light sources - at least not up close when you look at them. I've been in systems with a regular sun, traveled a very far way away, and the planets & ship become very dark. But then I've done the same in systems with neutron stars or black holes and the planets are still 1/2 lit 1/2 dark and the same with the ship. So I do think they have some lighting issues, although I suppose it could have been my graphics driver.

Oh, I'm sure they have issues. Frontier currently doesn't support more than one (1) light source in the code last time I checked. So accurate shadows can be an issue. Heck, there are countless, reflective light sources.

The Earth from the standpoint of being on the Moon was a bright reflector. The sub-paper-thin mylar used on the Lunar Module (LM) to deflect photons (for thermal protection, so it could be much lighter than the Command Module, CM) was so reflective, it caused an array of rays to shine out from the lander itself -- love debunking those those Moon Conspiracy theories.

There are so many light sources in space. The Russians and others also like mylar as a counter-counter measure, space too, no atmosphere required. Designed to be f'ing sensor blinding, leveraging the Sun's own photons, against both infrared and visual image recognition. And the clutter isn't great for radar either.

But keep in mind that both black holes and neutrons can be blindingly bright! They pull in a lot of light into their "arcs" and even "orbits"!

As I said ... Interstellar did one of the best jobs.

[Roger Wilco Jr]

@TheBS

Your posts can be fascinating, educational, and pardon the pun, illuminating.

RE my comments about the visor. I may have been a little too fast jumping on TorTorden's comments. It really goes back to another question about why we aren't blinded by the sun? If there is some kind of cockpit polarization, then how does it work when the glass is blown out? So either it must be ignored, or there must be some protection built into the visor. And that assumes that if you were near a sun's corona and looked directly at the sun that it would be blinding. Anyway, if it dimmed/polarized when you were looking at the sun, it would brighten when you looked away and you could see more stars. This would also apparently apply for moving away from the sun's (?) ambient illumination.

But about that last bit. At least on Earth, I understand about standing behind a floodlight (it facing away) and putting telescopes outside cities - hence my comment about a moonlit night in the country. But if I used my hand to block the floodlight, I would be able to see a lot more around it. And I always assumed that if I went higher and higher, the ambient glow would become less and less. And then if I was in space, I wouldn't even need to use my hand, and I wouldn't even be able to see the floodlight beam. I thought I wouldn't even be able to tell if the floodlight was on or not.

I'm not a scientist nor a physicist. Most of what I've learned has probably come from TV and movies. But when you say photons are photons are photons, and that they travel in a straight line, that is what I thought. So if I was in space, facing away from a sun, I would assume that the photons would shoot past me in a straight line and they could not enter my pupil unless they reflected off of something. So I don't understand how there can be a bright ambient light that washes out the galaxy, but the other way around just won't click in my mind.



P.S. About that visor. I believe there was no mention of it until it appeared when they added the pilots to the ship models in game. Before that, the manual suggested that you were not wearing a helmet or visor at all. There was mention of how in an emergency your eyes and ears could be protected from vacuum, and also how you would be provided with an emergency air supply. And even if polarizing visor technologies were developed in the 50's, you need to remember that this is the 34th century! You can't even plot more than one jump manually on the nav computer. And they have 1.3T sensors with a 4km range that can increase up to 256T for a 7km range! So polarizing visor technology may be a lost art in the Elite universe.

[thebs]

@TheBS - Your posts can be fascinating, educational, and pardon the pun, illuminating.

I'm just an engineer (who's done a lot of IT too).

RE my comments about the visor. I may have been a little too fast jumping on TorTorden's comments. It really goes back to another question about why we aren't blinded by the sun? If there is some kind of cockpit polarization, then how does it work when the glass is blown out? So either it must be ignored, or there must be some protection built into the visor. And that assumes that if you were near a sun's corona and looked directly at the sun that it would be blinding. Anyway, if it dimmed/polarized when you were looking at the sun, it would brighten when you looked away and you could see more stars. This would also apparently apply for moving away from the sun's (?) ambient illumination.

Whether it's a polarizing visor or filters or a telescope, we've addressed this largely in the mid 20th century. It's all become commodity by the late 20th century. I used the wielder's polarizing visor as an example of a real-life, practical implement that doesn't cost too much that protects against the brightest of plasma torches.

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In the '50s, the NACA learned a lot just in a few short years, even without the US military's help, as the US gov't tried to keep military and civilian separate (stupidly). And throughout the '60s, NASA literally innovated the majority of everything we take for granted in our consumer products ... an 1,000 fold more than the NACA prior. Since then it's been commodity, going down in price every decade with economies-of-scale as manufacturing and extraction improvements increased.

Heck, in the '80s we figured out how to extract titanium, one of the 10 most abundant materials in the world, much more cheaply than before. Titanium's main issue (and added cost) is that you cannot wield it in an oxygen environment (TiOx is brittle).

But about that last bit. At least on Earth, I understand about standing behind a floodlight (it facing away) and putting telescopes outside cities - hence my comment about a moonlit night in the country. But if I used my hand to block the floodlight, I would be able to see a lot more around it. And I always assumed that if I went higher and higher, the ambient glow would become less and less. And then if I was in space, I wouldn't even need to use my hand, and I wouldn't even be able to see the floodlight beam. I thought I wouldn't even be able to tell if the floodlight was on or not.

Yes, you would be able to see more around something if you block the source from your immediate vector -- i.e., looking at it, but no longer can see it. But the light is still beaming along other vectors, including those that bounce off objects and flood your vision. Even hundreds of millions of miles away, a planet can reflect the sun brightly. In fact, this is one of those things missed in the conspiracy theories on the moon landings, when the Earth is only a fraction of a million miles away from the Moon.

It's certainly enough that dim light sources will no longer be visible versus, say, if you were much, much farther away from that source.

I'm not a scientist nor a physicist. Most of what I've learned has probably come from TV and movies.

My wife hates watching TV shows and movies with me because I debunk a lot of things that have become "media science" that just isn't real.

And don't get me started on the Big Bang Theory.

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I don't even have to visit the scientific things they blatantly get wrong in that show, but anyone who is purposely an arrogant a-hole is not well-accepted by his peers, especially not fellow engineers and scientists. I.e., we all rely on one another, no one knows everything. In fact, the one thing we don't accept is CYA, which is why there are now 17 dead astronauts via NASA when engineers didn't just miss, but often refused to accept risk for political (often both environmental and schedule) reasons.

One of the ways to tell a true engineer or scientist is if they enjoy the show ... more specifically we overwhelmingly do not. As much as people like to assume such, nothing would get done if engineers and scientists were remotely like such, especially with each other, but also yet others they have to reach. At most you get a Carl Sagan type "cold shoulder," Sagan being frowned upon by some of his peers for going to media, despite his great research and innovations (part of which he brilliant put into protagonist in Contact). This is also why you don't see real scientists and virtually never any engineers in US media, especially given the polarizations and politicking that are just hypocritical and self-defeating ("against" in an aligned way), and at odds with facts.

I mean, even I have to bite my tongue at times, having worked on Advanced Air Defense (aka Missile Defense) during the Clinton Administration (yes, Clinton, not W.).

Lately, I don't even bother ... people just assume what they've been told, programmed to not understand what they speak ... whether it's defense or the environment (no, I'm not a climate denier ... I've long followed NAO and other changes, living nearly all my life in Florida). I mean, North Korea has S-300VM and China and even Iran are rolling out S-400, all while the US media says, "Oh, they're just defensive systems." Meanwhile, '90s THAAD technology sits undeployed because of the US media and even paid subversion of popular opinion (Google Czech BIS and Russia) to label it an "unbalancing system." US' allies now realize the US won't deploy equivalent systems, not even 20 years later when other countries deploy equivalent systems, and earlier systems, namely PAC-3, are a joke in capability comparison.

Only when a country privately threatens the US (e.g., Japan, Kuwait, Saudia Arabia) do they get the "quietly" get the equivalent systems, which only pisses off other allies, even the entire NATO organization. All because most Americans don't know the first thing about the geo-politics going on, much less what the S-400 is -- and its all-important sensory capabilities, the main "issue" with Advanced Air Defense (not the interceptor).

Now one might ask ... "What would an engineer know of the politics?" We have to be!

E.g., had to put a wing on a Hera ... a target ballistic missile (Wikipedia) ... so it could do an 1G+ maneuver ...

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and be considered an aircraft so the Clinton administration could tell the Russians to go f' themselves (he was totally infuriated with the Russians by '99 -- i.e., the Russians are total hypocrites as they continue to develop new, more capable, offensive missiles, while we don't ... only targets using old boosters). Yeah, that's not a joke ... those are the literal type of designs (and costs) that end up impacting and directing engineering, all political ... while the average American watching TV is utterly ignorant.

This whole North Korea thing is about blackmail, which is why we've re-kickstarted the National Missile Defense (NMD) program. I loved, and read the full, report from the US GAO on how basically gutting it over the last decade is now going to cost the US taxpayer far more money for a far less capable system in the next 10 years. All because people don't realize that deterrence is about stopping anything, saying, "Don't bother, we can shoot it down." We didn't, and the North Koreans know each time they come asking for free stuff -- something Carter "wet their appetite" with in '94 (over the objections of the Clinton administration -- this all happened before W., THAAD was designed for the Japanese and South Koreans explicitly) -- they can demand more "free stuff."

You will never hear this stuff in the US media. It's all the doing of some, single administration according to them, despite it all predating him.

But when you say photons are photons are photons, and that they travel in a straight line, that is what I thought. So if I was in space, facing away from a sun, I would assume that the photons would shoot past me in a straight line and they could not enter my pupil unless they reflected off of something. So I don't understand how there can be a bright ambient light that washes out the galaxy, but the other way around just won't click in my mind.

Oh, there are many reasons. Particles are not required, although light bouncing off of objects definitely does make a difference.

But ... what's also really going to make your brain hurt if you think about it is how much a sun bends its own space-time and causes light to travel in that "straight line" in directions that are not always away from you, but at some angles towards you. It's slight, but possibly significant enough.

P.S. About that visor. I believe there was no mention of it until it appeared when they added the pilots to the ship models in game. Before that, the manual suggested that you were not wearing a helmet or visor at all. There was mention of how in an emergency your eyes and ears could be protected from vacuum, and also how you would be provided with an emergency air supply. And even if polarizing visor technologies were developed in the 50's, you need to remember that this is the 34th century! You can't even plot more than one jump manually on the nav computer. And they have 1.3T sensors with a 4km range that can increase up to 256T for a 7km range! So polarizing visor technology may be a lost art in the Elite universe.

Everything is a balancing act in the game engine, for game play, I'm sure. I'm just offering the realities of today's, commodity technology that would most definitely be not even pointed out in the future. E.g., just like we don't point out a keyboard as the default method for a computer today.

I mean, if you really want to go there ... I seriously doubt we'd have a trading system based on human-piloted ships. It would be far more costly than necessary.

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We're already using robotic land trains to manage logistics and supply cross-country in war zones ... by the early 21st century. The entire materials are also suspect, so I don't really get too worried about if the ships use something like [plexi]glass, AlON, etc... or whatever medium that causes the (optical reality of) refraction which they model, etc... I mean, I can think of inertia realities for a pilot, along with particles slamming into the ship and ripping it apart and other things ... things that a Whipple Shield (Wikipedia) wouldn't do anything against. Again, I don't think about it, but just enjoy the physics they do model.

BTW, after seeing the Shuttle Orbiter up close after just a short orbital mission flight ... I honestly never want to fly into Earth orbit.

It's getting bad up there, and the Chinese have all but assured us of a Kessler Syndrone when they pulled the dumbest move in the world in 2007 (Wikipedia). Some 100+ years from now, it will be named as one of the top 10 mistakes in history. The 1985 US intercept was bad enough (Wikipedia), but there were only a fraction as many objects in orbit back then, and the "sky drag" as deorbited virtually everything.

But if you watch the US media, they made a huge issue of Operation Burnt Frost in 2008 (Wikipedia), which had 0 impact. It was already undergoing re-entry, and there no issues with debris remaining at all. That was wholly unlike the Chinese, and we've already had more than one event as a result. Some thing this was purposefully timed. I.e., Take the existing American, Russian and even increasingly independent European Union space positioning, sensory and tracking systems, and now realize where the Chinese military is headed growth-wise over the next 10-20 years, and how they would like the former "mitigated" from being something they don't have.