Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 19, 2017 12:52 pm
N810 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 19, 2017 9:01 am
What about in galaxies that contain an unusual amount of nebula
(Cough Josh)
The genral idea of forward facing wings is to increase maneuverability, in such relatively dense areas
of space at sublight speed might these things be usefull ?
"relatively dense"
when you are inside you dont notice that its there.
Just as Cornflakes said.
When we look at Hubble pictures of nebulae, there's a lot of magic going on. For one thing, those aren't the "real" colors. What Hubble actually does is capture photons for a while using different filters that are keyed to normal components of nebulae, such as hydrogen and ionized oxygen. Then a person maps the strengths of the photons collected to particular colors, and combines those separate images into one. The resulting colors might be close to the real visual frequency of the light that's reflected or emitted by the nebula at particular wavelengths, but they don't have to be... and that's the origin of the "
Hubble palette."
Another piece of magic is that we're looking at these nebulae from a great distance -- these clouds can actually span light-years. At that size, and from our distance, even our best telescopes and software tricks can't resolve the gaps between particles. So we "see" them as nearly-solid objects, when really they're extremely tenuous. As Cornflakes said, although nebulae appear dense from a long distance, when you're actually in them they're not what we'd consider dense (like fog) at all. Visually, you might not even see anything but space.
So what Josh is doing with his wonderful nebulae (like other space games) is indulging in a bit of artistic license. If we can see the "stuff" of nebulae as we fly through them in LT, that's a game effect, not an accurate (we think) simulation of reality.
That said, because LT's nebulae are mostly a nice visual touch (with sometimes maybe some gameplay-mechanical effects?), the idea that wings might be of some value isn't crazy. If there's enough stuff in a nebulae to see it as we fly through it, there's maybe enough stuff to make an "atmospheric" shape worth having. The idea of wings is still not entirely useful because those are meant to deliver lift in a fluid (such as air) versus gravity... and there's no gravity in regular space, so there's nothing to "lift" against. But a planar body for a spacecraft might still be useful in terms of reducing drag.
Apologies to anyone already familiar with this stuff. It's just fun to think about.