EVE dev video shows work on engine trails, custom ship skins and more

@foofad P.s., what I really want to see is actual weapon models for missiles. I'm tired of seeing ships burp out missiles from some arbitrary invisible point on the model.

@foofad
The angular vertical ship was the winning entry to that competition if i remember correctly, there will be 1 new BC per race coming soon, and if I heard that correctly they were all chosen from contest entries, not just the one winning ship.

@Utakata It's a matter of some debate, but basically: It depends mostly on the propellant used, and what kind of exhaust it has as a result of whatever reaction is doing the propelling. For starters, the kind of engine trails you see in games, and the kind that used to exist in Eve particularly, don't happen in real life. In order for the trail to glow, it has to either produce its own light or reflect light heavily - and most of the exhaust products (with some exceptions) of modern rocket engines don't do either.

For example, the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) is a liquid fueled rocket. It runs off of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. The main component of its exhaust is... water. Superheated steam. Water just straight up doesn't do the whole "glowing space trail" thing. I'm not sure what other types of liquid propellants are used but I'll make the educated guess that they are all equally unspectacular in the exhaust department.

Where things get potentially interesting is when you start talking about other engine types. There are various types of electromagnetic thrusters like ion thrusters, plasma thrusters, etc, which leave behind a trail of glowing ionized gas. They tend to produce a faint glowing effect similar to the Mach disk formed by jet engines, rockets, etc - but they don't leave a noticeable "trail" exactly. Also they're totally useless for combat because they produce almost no thrust. However, scale things up by a very large factor and they might produce enough glowing, ionized gas exhaust to actually leave behind some kind of a trail. Maybe.

But then you run into another problem: Actually getting the exhaust particles to march out of the engine in a straight line. Generally speaking it wouldn't be a very useful engine if the exhaust went everywhere, but as it starts to interact with itself in various ways, it's going to disperse. Whether it will disperse too quickly to leave behind a noticeable glowing trail (if all other conditions were there in order to produce a glow at all) is anyone's guess. But now we've gone all the way from strict reality to total fantasy.

TL;DR: No, pretty glowing engine trails don't happen in reality.

Oh, also - No, exhaust doesn't freeze when it hits space. Hot things in space tend to stay hot for the same reason the coffee in your thermos stays hot. There's a layer of vacuum between your drink and the outside, living between the double-walls of the container. This serves as an insulator. Yadda yadda, it's called convection in thermodynamics, it's why you wouldn't freeze without a space suit on and why most of the modern NASA space suits spend most of their time trying to cool you off rather than warm you up.

I should probably go back to doing homework.

@foofad

Well, thanks for sharing that. Though I feel bad I made you interupt your studies so you could explain all that. It was really informative, as well took care of some misconceptions I had with the mechanics of exhausts in space. Although, I appeared to be on the right track in concluding there are no pretty trails left behind.

@foofad

Its not rocket science you know!....?... wait a second...

@pcgneurotic

It was a visit to the ART DEPARTMENT you twit.... What do you expect?

Go to other departments at a game development studio and you'll see other things. But artists, are paid to make things look pretty, and care a lot about that.

@Kalex716

Speaking of rocket science...by looking further on down the post you would find pcgneurotic confessing that the above you replied to was indeed a joke. If the line "im horrified quick where's my medicine?" wasn't enough indication...

...and same to everyone else who downrank'd it. Just saying.

@Utakata
/comfort

@Utakata

I think it was more the shock of having an Eve/CCP post without any mouth-frothing. ;) Anyway, I'd like to apologise for my attempt at satire. Didn't help anything. Silly.

@Nenene

Thnaks! :)

And /comforts pcgneurotic.

@Critical Mass For animation I think. I doubt they use it for modeling, but it's possible.

@foofad

Oh, I guess you might be right.

I like it for modeling, I guess I was jumping to conclusions here, my bad.