I think it would be awesome to have airlocks that can be opened and “suck” players out into space where they slowly suffocate. This would add realism to combat in space.
It would also be awesome to have maps that have realistic blackholes in them, obviously of artificial nature and of a small mass. Falling into one or being pushed by another player’s lucy shot should make an interesting view as one is spheghettified and redshifts. The player’s point of view would have some fun and interesting light distortion as they fell inward. Death by blackhole would be an interesting way to kill an enemy player in Trem.
Also realistic asteroid impacts in trem could be a fun element of tremulus maps.
Space radiation could play a part on some maps also.
Just some fun and interesting ideas I thought I would spam out there.
There would be no map to play on if there was a black hole in it.
Gamma Radiation from the sun?
Instead of random colors and light distortions, why not have it so it does what a black hole does, bending all light around it so have it anything in the POV of the alien or human will bend and distort
Great ideas helpingbot, I did not mention warping the pov because I did not know the engine could do it.
Depends on the mass of said blackhole. In example an artificial blackhole with the mass of mount Everest would not devour the entire map necessarily. Bear in mind any map that has warp wormholes is dealing with connected black holes by default, this would be a lot like a wormhole but more violent and probably leads nowhere but to the center. Black holes could also be suspended in a field if its the distant future(antigravity field?)
The gamma and x ray radiation would be cosmic radiation, not necessarily from the sun itself. In example betwixt galaxies there are massive amounts of cosmic radiation that have excessively high energy. Even though stars are not close there are still other forms of rays that are in space. Not entirely sure what it would look like to be killed by them though
Having the pov of the light bend would be awesome. Great ideas
It would be cool if aliens didn’t need to breath, and humans had access to a environmental protection suit, for both space maps and interesting underwater ones.
Also, since even light has mass, just having even a small black hole active is a death sentence to the station. I don’t think any scientist would risk killing everything. Unless it is artificially gravitically pulled onto itself, and the hole doesn’t have enough mass by itself to be one, then when the gravity field is destroyed the hole will harmlessly dissappear. Or become a star. Or something went wrong and everything within a light year is devoured. Possibilities! That could be a fun feature, being able to deactivate the holes for random results.
Great points and I agree about the protection suits
This is very true, however we could allow some artistic license here. And if we are going to be rigorously accurate we could make the blackhole the mass of a mountain rather than a planet. That being said that would be a rather boring black hole because its black event horizon would be the diameter of a human hair… Also hawking radiation if accurately represented would boil everyone alive Well irradiated warfare could be interesting.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson discussed the high energy rays in intergalactic space in his “Astrophysics for people in a hurry” audiobook: https://youtu.be/N8UZhFf06Is?t=3839
Come to think of it, cosmic rays would also be hard to represent in intergalactic space because intergalactic space would be mostly dark
At the very least we have some cool concepts to play with and modify until they are fun. Realism need not trump fun in a game With a few tweaks these things could become fun and creative map elements, even if not represented to scale.
Technically that is not entirely true. Light has energy but no mass, and while according to special relativity energy and mass are suppose to be two different forms of the same thing (E=MC2), they are still different with different properties. What happens with light in a gravitational field (according to general relativity), is the gravity distorts space time, which means the paths to travel through that space time exerting the least action would be curved, so the light traveling through that distorted space time would just be following one of those curved paths.
Well, light can be absorbed by particles that have mass, and such a particle’s energy would increase by the amount of energy the light that it absorbed had. But due to restrictions imposed by special relativity, nothing traveling the speed of light is suppose to have mass (like light, gravitons, and gluons)
I am not sure if light has mass, but it does have energy and speed However a blackhole should still be able to pull it in due to space time curvature so its mass may not necessarily be relevant, if we can just toss space-time curvature at the problem, of course working in relativistic and quantum physics into a game engine could get complicated But we could simulate it I would think, however the energy/mass thing with light is weird, its a good thing the engine does not need to understand all of this to simulate it
Also its a good thing we don’t have to understand it to the same degree as a physics PHD to program it either otherwise this would take a very very long time to simulate.
We need a general-purpose script-able ‘environmental’ effects system for mappers to utilize (which would cover the concept/idea presented in @edaq’s OP), as well as open up many possibilities for interesting maps, that would look and feel different than anything else.
If we could manage a good map editor and add these in it, I’m all up for some mapping (Even if I’m still learning how to use the current tools, I’ve got a few ideas that would be really good with a blackhole and airlocks in them.)
@dGr8LookinSparky
Photons mass is only 0 theoretically (or at least according to the french wikipedia).
The wikipedia Mass part in the right panel:
(Link: Photon - Wikipedia)
Which means that it has a mass, but it is just too low to be perceptible or even significant enough to cause anything.
According to that section, for the most part it is implied or assumed that light has 0 mass, but if light were to have mass, that would not for the most part contradict the mainstream theories, it would just result in certain different observable properties. Those properties have not been observed yet within a certain precision, so if light does have mass, it would have to be smaller than what those experiments can observe, currently less then 1×10−18 eV/c2. With that said, it looks like light does appear to have mass properties inside a super conductor.
But we could simulate it I would think, however the energy/mass thing with light is weird, its a good thing the engine does not need to understand all of this to simulate it 
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