I have often wondered why the station entry portals are just a blank wall. Instead of that would it add more to show what appears to be ships parked (or moving) inside a large hangar bay? It would not need to be different for each station but anything would be more appealing than a blank wall, in my opinion. I understand the airlock argument, if that is the current explanation; however, I believe looking like you are actually entering something would be add more visually.

Thank You

From what I understand, all the current stations are essentially kit-bashed together out of generic and self contained parts.

That's why the docks all have static airlock doors at the back, rather than opening into a hanger; this allows them to be slapped onto virtually any surface with no modification. While having docks that open into actual garage spaces, or even hangers, would be cool, it would require a change to the way stations are constructed that the devs don't have the time and resources to do right now.

A lot of them hook up to a "hangar" module too, so they could make the ships and such part of that module and just have the back of the docking bay door use the force field effect instead.

I understand. I am not suggesting that the portals actually open into anything. All I was thinking was changing the graphic of that wall into a graphic that "looks" like an interior bay, nothing else changes. For the ease of the programmers it would be the same for each station. In other words, just redesign the wall.

We're basically going to change it to be a really bright light that you can't see into.

Having a whole hangar there would add a whole lot of geometry that would only be visible for a moment. As framerate budgets go, there are other places I would prefer to add complexity (like, the exteriors of stations themselves).