For me it's gotta be ice worlds. The colours and canyons can't be beat. Sliding around like a madman in the SRV is fun too.

Ice worlds have some fantastic color.

I also enjoy the rocky worlds with large mountain ranges. They are heck to traverse in the SRV (and I avoid it), but are fantastic to see looming on the horizon from smoother plains.

The new textures for planets in 2.1 are a great step forward, too.

I remember landing on an ice world in one of the nebulas I visited, the sky and ice were a vivid emerald green. One of the most fantastic views I have had in Elite.

Even better when you find a binary or moon orbiting a ringing gas giant, spectacular.

Found an interestingly colored ice world and thought of this thread:

Very nice.

How are you liking the Orca? I found her a surprisingly fun multirole. Can't wait for passengers and the Beluga. Hope it comes with large hardpoints so I can run my own Q-ship!

The Orca is working well. I've got it fitted with a fuel scoop, as the 16 ton tank seems to drain quickly. Cargo performance is poor for a large pad ship, only 136 tons. But a really fun to fly ship, with great handling.

But the passenger role will likely see it perform better.

Lately, I've actually been thinking that while the Beluga is fantastic, I'm actually growing pretty interested to see the Dolphin. Looks to be a small pad ship, which I'd enjoy.

Yeah, small ships are still fun, I've been playing around in the iCourier a bit the last few weeks.

Some love for small rocky worlds...

Hey Adlabs, what HUD color scheme are you using for the screen shot above? It looks better than the ones I've tried.

-B

Behomoth, here are my HUD values:

<MatrixRed> -0.04, 0.05, 2 </MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen> -0.07, 2, -0.5 </MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue> 1.75, -0.23, -0.3 </MatrixBlue>

Thanks Ad!

Sure thing!

BTW, some nice video/images of the improvements to planets coming in v2.2:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/294757-Planetary-Comparison-Video-2-1-vs-2-2

I was under the impression from various comments in the Elite community that using an extended -200 to 200 matrix range would not translate the intended full spectrum output onto the ingame graphics but it appears to work in your case.

However, are Hostiles radar contacts still color differentiated properly on your HUD ?

I'm trying to get a Green HUD which will still allow me to differentiate Hostile, friendly, neutral and jump wake comtacts on the radar. Not much luck thus far. The Matrix is somewhat limited in the sense that fooling with one color palette washes out a bunch of others.

Took a while, but I grabbed a screenshot to show a hostile.

Thank you

I never found a color modded HUD that didn't wash out certain radar blips such that different categories appear as the same color

I retain the usual orange but reduce the red in the Red Matrix from 1 to 0.7 and then use the cockpit right panel to adjust the interface brightness to 4 bars to soften the incandescence because the default settings tend to give a very glaring output.