I took a screenshot of the sky, recently. It's pretty, until I realized that I'm not on a moon around this gas giant, but that the gas giant is 3.5 AU, or further than the distance from Earth to Jupiter (which is about 3 AU right now); this gas planet should be a dot in the sky, albeit a bright dot even in some hours of daylight, like this dusk scene. So, I thought, what if I wanted to observe the dot which should be a dot, using an instrument of observation? Has not mankind always asked this question? So I propose that planets in the sky be much smaller with the naked eye, and that a telescope be a thing for observing said planets. Now that we are in galaxy mode, also the stars in the galaxy should be in the sky, too. I've been very confused watching things in the sky move so much whenever I move, yet the stars do not move. They should move, and they should be actual stars you could visit, now that there are so many on the galactic map, and should be observable things. So let's have a telescope and interesting ways to observe with it! Other types of telescopes could be put to use for other things, like observing large artificial objects like stations, or detecting. Call it a BA detector block, and it may have various types -- optical, radar, infrared. Infrared observation is useful for observing distant stars. Just look at what the 2MASS scopes have been able to do, seeing much the way through the Great Rift and adding billions of stars to Earth databases. This implies the galaxy map should be inaccessible until you have the proper equipment to feed IDA more data. Went through a strange and peculiar manner of teleporting a whole galaxy away, and don't know where you are? Just hitting the swirly icon should not fix this in a galaxy survival game! Of course, scopes operate much more efficiently when there isn't an atmosphere getting in the way. I want to build a space or lunar telescope! An IR space telescope could provide all the stellar positioning data for the galaxy. Optical land telescopes of course are useful for local planetary observations -- those solitary dots which persist in the dawn or dusk hours, a dot which seems brighter than the other dots... I want to look at them, I want to discover the gas giant and maybe with a good telescope, its moons, too. And I want to look closer at the local planet's moon, to see if there are some tell-tale squares in the ground. You know what I mean. Radar is good for detecting stars, too, and not all are a huge dish. Radar for BA I know is in the works somewhere, and so extraterrestrial radar wave detection should be a thing as an evolution of the spinny radar dish for detecting drones, to detect capital ships or stations within a certain distance in the sky above. I would also like to know when the trading station is above me without placing yet another waypoint on my map which I couldn't place without first going into space and searching just everywhere for it using a puny SV detector. Sound nice? That trading station should want to be detected! These machines might be moddable, you know. BA-based, long-range radio detection equipment should do this much easier, especially for anything with an auction trading block on it. Maybe a hack mod could detect where there is an ATM machine, and T2 hack mods siphon the network for stray credits. You know, a Zirax Listening Post could have one of these BA radio-based detectors; it already looks like a big dish, and it's "listening." Let's make it actually listen! Would it be nice to take it over to listen to things? More observations of the new galaxy could be revealed using a proper caliber of telescope. For example, did you know that in the Milky Way, about half -- 50% -- of the stars you see out there are actually a set of binary stars? Other things like the revealing of planets around distant systems from an appropriate caliber of telescopes, would be interesting, though this may take some time to find them while locked onto a particular star for observation. We know timers exist for the factory, so why not for other things, like observation?
Neat ideas, but I honestly thing this is the wrong game to apply them to. First, I think the stars you see in the sky, and in the distance while out in space, are all stars you can visit. Pretty sure if you go to the edge of the galaxy and look away from the center, you'll see no stars. Now, regarding the scale. I think you'll just have to make do with how it is. Note that moons are usually 12km away from planets, not a few hundred thousand kilometers. Likewise, the planets themselves are only a couple dozen km across at the most. (I say across, not around, because these are definitely flat earth planets. lol) To scale things up accurately would require things to move much faster to accommodate, and the engine can't handle that. Even still, accurate scale would introduce drastically more tedium. Other games have done this, and while it's a bit more immersive, it's not even remotely fun. I'm not going to comment much on the scopes and all that. Sounds like a bunch of game mechanics that wouldn't fit too well. Or rather, making them fit would detract from what's already here and what the focus is.
I would love if the sky on planets was based on the sky you see in space, according to atmospheric density or something.
Volumetric clouds. At least their fast approximation, please. Via "True Cloud" Unity plug-in or something similar, I believe should be possible and relatively simple.
