Hi,

          Just a few thoughts, and wanted to see what others thought, and if my guess is too unweidly at present.

Right now skyboxes are used of course to enhance the atmosphere of the system we find ourselves in, it gives us the temperature color, green, red, blue, yellow, sky and added highlights for nebulae and distant stars (as in unreachable stars flickering in the night sky). But if we can create a box that surrounds us to give us this impression, couldnt it also be possible to paint a skybox green grass, low laying hills with trees, a city in the distance and blue sky, or a night sky with stars overhead?

If it is possible then to "paint" a skybox to give us the appearance we are in deep space, or orbital space as the case may be, then it seems just a matter of changing what that painting depicts.

In addition, right now, if you or i reach the center of a wormhole, there is an event triggered that moves us to another location, another wormhole in some other far off or close by region. Usually from system to system yes? Anyway, if there is such a trigger, why not load two skyboxes on start, one is the overlay for the space system, complete with planets, asteroids, ships and orbital battles. The other, could be an underlay, not seen but held in memory, until we come closer and closer to the surface of a planet, a "trigger" point, like the center of a wormhole that is then triggered to show, perhaps a short animation, of reaching atmosphere, coming down through the clouds and then to the surface. At this point i am assuming there might be a zoom reset, so that at this point, all zoom goes from surface to atmosphere. So we are inside a box within a box. We land our ships, perhaps only specialized craft can make landings to the surface, shuttles shall we say, that have a small decelerating animation, much like engine thrust animations to show the landing. Once down, we might deploy excavators, or mobile runners for exploration, or begin mining operations on surface details much like the asteroids in orbit. We need not change any code, simply the overlaying image. An asteroid being mined in orbit, now looks like a metal encrusted hillside on the "surface" skybox. It might be possible to have frigatefactories or capitalship factories on the surface as well, not producing frigates or capitals, but their surface equivalent.

This might mean of course, that as gravity wells are currently invaded and assaulted by pirates or opponents, that these surface skyboxes could and would also be invaded. These "Landing Zone" skyboxes, complete with sky and hillsides, cities in the distance and stars in the sky, might not be any bigger than the gravity well we currently use for battles and support structures.

Apart from the feasibility of this or not, it would be nice to have further upgrades available for increasing population on planets, and increasing the number and kinds of support structures built. Of course this would probably have to be done in an expansion, that added the content. But it would be nice to see, even if surface skyboxes never materialize.

Anyway, does any of this sound feasible? I dont think it needs to incorporate any new coding than what we already have, perhaps just additional "loops" of it, to account for "surface" on one side, and "orbit" on the other. By contrast to landing, a "launch" execution from the surface could have our shuttle firing boosters and ascending, until we reach the surface skybox "trigger" threshold located in high atmosphere, where again like the wormhole we would be relocated to the orbital view, zoom reset, and now we are in the gravity well again, ready to explore, battle or defend or whatever. 

Let me know your thoughts please,

Take care and thank you for listening,

-Teal