I've noticed on several occasions when in space that, depending on my orientation, a slight movement in a certain direction could hide or reveal an asteroid (off in the distance) that wasn't there before.

As I fly towards the asteroid, this effect gradually becomes more difficult to reproduce and "fixes" itself. Once close enough it becomes obvious that the asteroid is not just a mirage, but actually real.

yo dawg its cause your FOV is a bubble and not a plane so like when you turn the roids are outside the bubble that is your fov you can do some cool stuff with the /set fov command where like /set fov 95 is my favorite

hey... thanks. that's awesome.

feels like a whole new game...

There is a 'far clipping plane' that is really far away and causes objects farther away than that to not be rendered. It rotates with you. Since it is a plane, points on the plane are actually slightly farther from you the farther from the center of the screen the display goes. I bet you notice the problem more along the edges of the screen as you rotate around.

How difficult would it be to make a 'far clipping sphere' instead of a plane? An even better solution would be to make the distance of the 'far clipping sphere/plane' user-set-able so that I can go mining in a sector without all my roids disappearing because the jump-in point is 42654839298m from the roid I want to mine

Actaully the "far clipping plane" only just got shortend, i think its about 10,000m away from an object, and it aint rendered. Really noticable in Odia B-13.

Again, why shorten it? I understand that Guild Software tries to support the one random guy who's running VO on an 80386 with 4 MB of RAM, but what about the rest of us? It's kind of important to be able to see all of the asteroids in a sector, for one thing. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons you'd want to be able to see farther than 10km as well.

Increasing the far clipping plane causes loss of precision up close. It's a trade-off. Loss of precision up close will cause z-fighting artifacts in all the station components.

Just out of curiosity, could you explain why making the clipping plane farther has an impact on short-range precision?

It's true that it makes prospecting in large asteroid fields feel like moving in the fog.

What about displaying clipped roids at least in the radar?