I like planets the way they are. I think if they were any bigger we would have a people complaining that you spend more time flying around a planet then doing anything else.

I agree with blue..

I like the size of the planets.. although I have only seen 3 (in demo). I actually think they are pretty big and in perspective...

Of course, I am no Fricken Genius

I think the whole thing is that the planetary docking rings are supposed to be in really high orbit. If you free-fly directly at a planet, it gets REALLY big before you start taking considerable damage from the atmosphere. Plus you need to take into consideration that it does take place outside the Milky Way Galaxy. Everything we know about planets is what we learned from our own. In Sirius, maybe the planets actually aren't as big as ours here. Just a thought.

yeah planets are fine the way they are. if they were bigger the ai would burn up too many ships in the atmosphere (hehe i saw 5 burn up at manhatten when i was docking funny stuff), and you also might misjudge something and burn up urself (as i did when i didnt know how to dock, it was kinda too late to pull up)

-I trade for a living, rouges piss me off, come get me, catch me if you can, i will leave you in the dust, or you'll die trying, take your pick.-

@Heretic Inc. We trade because we own.@

DangerMaus "Is it just me, or...?"

No, it's not just you.

--milo
www.starshatter.com

trent- "hey whats this warning mean?"

computer - "means if u keep going down to the planet you will be cooked"

trent - "really to what?"



-I trade for a living, rouges piss me off, come get me, catch me if you can, i will leave you in the dust, or you'll die trying, take your pick.-

@Heretic Inc. We trade because we own.@

Ive been burned up by those planets...That stupid sun fried me up too... One little thing, the planets are fine, the sun isnt at all to scale, really small. Oh well, cant make it too big i guess. There is a fine line between reality and gaming. I think thats a good comparison...

The planets and the sun will appear small because you happen to be a LONG way from them. Think about it...the sun appears to be no bigger than a grape in the sky...but oh my!..it has to be bigger than that!

I read once the first time men looked back at the Earth from the surface of the Moon...they thought..."the Earth sure looks small!"

the sun is a white dwarf.....do you knwo what dwarf means?

-I trade for a living, rouges piss me off, come get me, catch me if you can, i will leave you in the dust, or you'll die trying, take your pick.- #Part of the traders protection pact# @Heretic Inc. We trade because we own.@

Yeah, a white dwarf is a very young sun.. now if it was a red giant, then......

Not exactly. Assuming that by "the sun" you mean our sun, Sol is an average bright yellow main sequence star of spectral class G2. The "main sequence" ranges from the incredibly large, hot, and bright blue-white O series stars such as Orionis C (30000 times brighter than the sun) to small, red, and dim M series red dwarf stars like Wolf 359. The spectral classes of the main sequence are O B A F G K M - the mnemonic is "Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me."

As our sun nears the end of its main sequence "life," it will use up most of the lightweight hydrogen fuel that feeds its fusion furnace. At some point it will balloon out into a red giant star, very hot and with a radius almost to the orbit of Venus. It will continue that way for several million years, consuming heavier elements and growing weaker and cooler. As it starts to run out of even the heavier elements to burn, it will become a "nova" or "new" star. It will shed the outer layers of gas to form a "planetary nebula" surrounding a hot white core not much larger than planet Earth. This super-dense hot white core is called a white dwarf. After several million more years, the white dwarf will burn out, leaving a solid tombstone in space - a brown dwarf (sometimes called a black dwarf).

The stars and planets in Freelancer are all much, much smaller and closer together than they would be in real life. Think about it - standing on the Earth and looking out into our solar system, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn are visible with the naked eye but appear no larger than bright stars. In the Low Earth Orbit that the space shuttle uses, it takes about an hour and a half to go around the planet once, traveling at 19000 miles per hour.

Thus endeth the astronomy class for this evening. Be sure to tune in next week for a seminar on black holes, quasars, and cepheid variable stars.

--milo
www.starshatter.com

A white dwarf is a very old star which has run out of hydrogen and burns only helium.

Err, in the interest of staying on topic, I think the planet size in Freelancer is fine. They're round, which is good enough.

If planets were "realistically scaled" it would make a real mess -- never mind realistically scaled stars!

Incidentally, a white dwarf is about the size of a planet, but as massive as a star.

Hah hah, milord beat me to the draw on that one ... I would add this, though:

A star expands into a "red giant" because the Helium core ignites and not necessarily because it runs out of hydrogen.

That is why big stars die sooner than little ones: the big stars build their helium core to critical mass (or "critical pressure" more quickly.

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If planets were "realistically scaled" it would make a real mess -- never mind realistically scaled stars!

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Nah, it would work fine (trust me on this). They would have to change some design ideas a bit. You wouldn't be able to cruise the solar system without trade lanes or jump gates, for example. And stumbling on secret bases would be a little different. But the basic idea of the game would work just fine, and it would have a more stark and vast sense of scale.

Y'know, there is a scene from the movie Titanic that illustrates this point: It's after the ship has struck the iceberg, about an hour and a half into the movie. You have totally immersed yourself in the sense of just how flipping huge that ship was, and how many people are on it. Everything is lit up, passengers are screaming, it's a scene of total chaos.

And then their is a ten second "helicopter" shot of the ship from about a thousand feet up. They're in the middle of nowhere in the north Atlantic at night, so everything is almost pitch black except for the lights of the ship, forming a tiny, doomed oasis of humanity in a vast expanse of nothingness. And then it hits you just how far away they are from home and what is about to happen to them. And that ship that looked so huge before seems pretty humble in comparison to the vast untamed wilderness of the ocean.

Well, outer space, real outer space is just like that only more so. Having a few brief moments of empty nothingness would only make the rest of the game seem more alive and significant in contrast.

As always, just my humble opinion.

--milo
www.starshatter.com