Hey IRS, wouldn't you attach a flashlight to your small port?

Well, you could, but don't expect it to be very effective. Ever shined a flashlight across a field? They get blotted out quickly at range unless you restrict the beam, and if you restrict the beam they tend to wind up being fairly useless for giving you information about your surroundings. Ship radar is your friend.

Rofl. "shine a flashlight in a field" Uhm. air molecules disperse the light.. Guess what.. no air in vacuum.. Light continues on.. perfect beams until affected by gravity, or a astronomical object, such as a planetoid/asteroid, or something similar.

EZR

edit: Take ambient light from sun and stars out of the equation, a spotlight on an asteroid will be seen on the moon, -if- they knew where to look. Now. add in the sun, and well now. now the light has to be brighter than the sun.

So.. All the flashlight has to do is, put out more lumens than whatever the ambient light is, voila. you can see.

I honestly hadn't accounted for atmospheric dispersal- I was simply thinking of the brutal truth of lumens/m^2. A flashlight only produces so many, and thus rapidly falls below the ambient light as its cone expands. You're right about air distorting the beam, but that loss is absolutely pitiful compared to the apparent loss as the cross section area expands. Thus come in searchlights, which hardly have any conical expansion, and lasers, which should have none.

However, their advantage in range is acquired at a loss in area. Sure, you can see a few thousand kilometers off, but your field of vision when using that light is limited to the cross section of the beam. Your 1m radius laserlight thus gives you a lovely 2m wide view at 5km. Hope that 'roid isn't a centimeter off the side of the beam- might take a bit off your 4m wide ship.

Greater than ambient light? I thought we were talking about a dark place where there is no ambient light. O_o

There's ambient light everywhere in space- it's only a question of how far off your source is. Sans a luminescent star, the ambient light comes from all the other stars in the sky. It's very dim, but it's still enough to cause endless headaches in picking out obstacles with your own light source. Turning off all the ship lights and looking for occlusions would probably work better than trying to generate enough light to make a noticeable reflection.

IRS is confusing me. First he says "Visual? What visual? Instruments only, buddy." Then he says its best to turn off all the ship lights and look for occlusions.

Because looking for occlusions is better then trying to light up your surroundings- but it's still horrible for actually giving you good information. Do note that I never stated that looking for occlusions was best, only that it was better than trying to use a light source. Instrumentation works because it's much more sensitive, doesn't get distracted, and has the ability to "see" in portions of the spectrum far outside those that the human eye does.

Back on the original topic... The new newspost mentioned several rather interesting sector possibilities, including some sectors where visibility would be even worse than in ion storms all the time, and a sector where players would leave 'trails' behind them. I'm thinking an accretion disk would work nicely for both such effects, or a pulsar system where you could even see the jets from it sweeping across the map.