Franco, not to argue. The effects are there because it looks cool.

There is some evidence that if you had a pressurized ship get hit you would experience some 'venting' of gasses. Granted it would be quick and not last long. 

Hell even in some of the Star Trek movies (Wrath of Khan, Undiscovered country) they show 'venting of gasses' mimicking smoke. 

As far as contrails for ships I am ok, with it. We have only chemical rockets currently, so who knows what a hyperdrive exhaust would look like. 

In any event I was giving an opposite view. I like em and they make the ships POP out at you. 

I remember reference to "the Star Wars effect" in one of the conversations.  I love the movies, but George Lucas ruined space battles forever.  We will never, as a public, really accept realistic space battles.  Last dev stream, I heard they are putting in lens flares.  It sounded like they were saying the battle viewer was too "clean" and not like popular movies.  I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

I hate the lens flare effects they used in the last two Star Trek movies. It made it look like the movie was being recorded with a camera (which it was, but who wants to be reminded of that while watching movies?).

Please, no lens flares. It is much too intrusive, annoying, and unrealistic.

I can see how a beam works,  but if we ate going.to have rockets exploding in space then it would have to be made diffetent than regular missiles that explode in an oxygen environment where there is no oxygen environment in space.

Whati'm saying is technology would have to be different than today, so there is really no way to gage how battling would actually work. For the most part you are getting information from a source, your not there.

A lot about space battles will never be realistic by today's standards. It's about gameplay over realism. They look good, so let's keep them.

If we really want to get into arguments about realism, a lot of what's going in the viewer will need to go, including much of the tech tree. For example, fire doesn't burn in space in the same way, or 'explode' outward. Without those explosions though, things wouldn't look half as cool.

http://www.space.com/13766-international-space-station-flex-fire-research.html

While we are at it, pls. someone also tell Stardock that there is no evidence of Drengin or other space aliens and that they better abandon the whole GC III thingie.

*ahh, no

Am I the only one who is bored of space battles in the dev stream? For a capability that will likely turn out to be 5% of my gameplay experience with this game, and I'll probably fast forward to the end to view the results, they have been spending a lot of development and dev stream time, for the last few months, on it. I realize moving sliders around, queuing production, and talking to aliens doesn't sell the game very well, but that's what im going to be spending most of my time doing when I play this game.

Very brief explosions are possible in space as the air and other flammables internal to the craft burns assuming the mixture is right. split second for small craft, perhaps a couple seconds for large craft. Ion and plasma propulsion might leave some contrails because the matter left behind might glow from elementals state changes. Again, probably very brief. Particles (smoke) might be visible while venting and concentrated assuming there is adequate light source to reflect. Out in deep space, space battle will probably occur in near pitch blackness.

Well it gives something visual to balance the stream a bit , and it's good they getting things right by taking their time on it. Maybe it's as simple as the fleet combat (and some diplomacy screen work) was their focus, so that's what they are showing right now. When something else becomes their focus, we'll see that.

As to how much of my gameplay it will be, it depends how the things like ship roles work out, and if they add any more with expansions. I will certainly be watching battles where I lose ships to work out why.  They could add roles like long range support fire ships for example, mega capitals (dreadnoughts), snub fighters (drones), or cloaking technology, as some examples. It really depends how involved they want to make it.

You've got to balance your designs vs the enemies, as always, only now thankfully there is more than just do you have more stats in that type of weapon than me, there are a few more variables taking place.

Maybe not the only one, but seeing the level of battles they can get to is interesting to me since I can't get that in my games yet.  Also, I notice a lot of new names in the chat associated with the stream.  New people are most likely going to want to see the bangs and flashes.  After all, it is pretty.

I think the economy stuff is still in balance and tweaking, but it would be nice to see which directions they were tweaking towards. I would like to see a stream session dedicated to the topic a little later in the development schedule.

I don't quite yet follow all the stuff about ship roles and fleet battles.  I'm afraid I am one of those who builds lots of the biggest ship I can field and just throw those at people.  I get the impression I will be encouraged by the new mechanics to branch out a bit in ship diversity, make a few more ship types in some comfortable ratios, throw those fleets at baddies, and let the battle viewer sort it out.  It will be an interesting learning curve for me.

I would really like to see more evidence of UI work for empire management.  The big colony list they gave a glimpse of was a good step in that direction, but only a start.  I am looking forward to having the very best tools possible for making my empire sprawl across the galaxy.  That's the part I am most hopeful/insistent about.

There are also no Terran space ships in reality But seriously it's looking great and on their latest video Paul mentioned they were going to real in the trails to make them smaller.

Saying that a missile's contrail can only happen in atmosphere is like saying that the only component in a contrail is the reaction between the heat generated by the propellent and the air it is traveling through. Forgotten is the result of the chemical reaction that produces the missile's thrust which will also show in the path the missile took. If oxygen is one of the components used to produce that chemical reaction, the oxygen must come from somewhere. Even in atmospheric missiles, it is more effective for the missiles to carry that oxygen on board than to attempt to gather it from the air it is traveling through. Missiles in space would also have to carry all of the chemicals used in its thrust producing reaction, and there would be resultant residue that would act like a contrail, even though it would dissipate quickly, but then, contrails in atmosphere also dissipate.

Excellent point. I stand corrected.

Any particulate matter involved in an explosive event is going to scatter and scatter rapidly.  All the energy levels involved will be very high and there will be very little left around to drift aimlessly or share orbits like a comet tail.    Things would tend to go poof silently and disappear instantly, maybe with a moment's worth of fireball if you're lucky.  Even large chunks of hull will disappear quick into the distance with the velocities involved.  Visually, it would be short and deeply unsatisfying, no matter how much you hated those bad guys.

I would love it, for a while.  It would be like watching 2001, A Space Odyssey with shoot-em ups, and I love that movie!  Then I would want to go back to playing a fun and flashy game along with my empire conniving.  I wouldn't be able to resist.  After all, we are talking about trading different levels of disbelief for different levels of entertainment.  I can make that trade!