Capital / Flagship Scale too small?
Are the capital ships and flagships to proper scale? When standing inside the Imperial hangar and seeing the size of the TIE fighters, versus the tiny hangar window you have to fly into to respawn yo...
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Glad I'm not insane 😃
@EA Any chance you could shed light on the design decision? Not reporting this as a bug or anything as it clearly was deliberate; just curious why the call was made to shrink them on the outside. 🙂
I'd encourage you all to download Universe Simulator, and 'fly' around the stars and universe. Why?
Because you can scale how fast you're travelling, from billions of lightyears at a time, to bare meters a second.
You can zoom alll the way down to a planet's surface, or you can zoom right past it like the Starship Enterprise.
The catch here, is that, as you're zooming quickly, passing stars in light-speed, the stars themselves, the objects, look small. Because you're going so much faster. Even ones you intersect. You cannot perceive their scale because you're not slowing down enough, to get close enough, to perceive it in a proper space-time continuity with your idea of scale.
Literally, you're warping space-time for yourself, and it's causing your perception of scale to shift. Physics and science are cool.
This game having faster craft, mean that the sense of scale is going to be less. As you're approaching the hanger, for example, the cut-in to you entering happens before you're really anywhere close to the door to perceive the scale properly. That's why you can entirely skim the trenches of a star destroyer, but it looks like you won't fit on approach.
That being said, the scale is off a bit, but bear in mind this trick of perception.
The other effect is, of course, our imaginations.
For example, the size of a B-25 versus a common fighter of the same era. You'd think the bomber would be much bigger, but in reality, it's footprint wasn't as large compared to it's nimble companions, as you'd expect a big bomber to be. Perception is a heck of a drug.
I certainly agree about travelling faster can make things seem smaller
My interpretation of why the scaling is too small is;
- The 3d depth of the outside cockpit view is too flat and produces a very slight cross-eyed effect.. In the past, I've experimented with a pair of cameras to make 3d videos, and from what I see in Squadrons is similar to having the two cameras the wrong distance apart, and each pointing at a point either too close, or too far away (produces a similar cross-eyed feel). In itself, this can make the world "feel" smaller or larger - I've only tried this on the Oculus headsets so far. Maybe this is an issue with the game talking to Oculus headsets and other headsets are seeing it correctly.
- the rate and way the space particles move past the cockpit. Some parallax applied to the near and more distant ones would have helped with the scaling
If you park an X-wing in the trench that runs along side of the star destroyers, then turn so the nose points at top ledge, and engines point at lower edge, the x wing almost touches both ledges at the same time.
Is showing actual incorrect scale of models? From other pics and videos I've seen, the xwing would be about a 1/3rd of this size.
EA_JozEA Staff (Retired)
Hey @DaBosun That is a great point of view! This happens to me a lot when playing Star Citizen. The doors of the hangar appear to be extremely small as I approach the base but once I get close enough, it seems to get bigger and I'm able to fly the ship right through it.
EA_Joz
