Wanted to share something funny, and something Squad might want to implement.

[Draconiator]

So I was testing my solar powered plane. It was daytime, and everything seemed well, but as soon as I fired up the ion engine,, itr would not turn on and said it was "Electricity Deprived". I was like o_O, nice and sunny, plenty of solar panels, even plenty of xenon containers. And then I look at the solar panel info. "Blocked by Mun". ...this got even more weird stares at the computer from me. How can we be in an eclipse when it is nice and bright out? Fortunately I remembered I had something in orbit at the same time over KSC, so I went to check it out.

Mystery solved. would be nice if they modeled eclipses too. things being nice and bright during an eclipse is...weird.

[Sirrobert]

Yea, it's a little funny how the Mun does block the light, but it doesn't get dark

[Thomas988]

Imagine being on Laythe when this would happen! You look up at Jool and see a huge black dot on it. Let's go, Squad!

[Nitrous Oxide]

Yeah, this was always kind of weird... but it might be a Unity limitation more than anything, so I'm not too sure if Squad can do anything... drawing a massive shadow would destroy anyone's FPS, even on the best rigs.

[Guest]

Drawing massive shadow is not necessary if you are close to the ground. All you need is to reduce ambient light level.

Ahm! How eclipse is supposed to look from space? Huge moving shadow?

[SkyRender]

Actually, a long time ago there was preliminary modeling for eclipse lighting in KSP.

It was a bit wonky, though (it only rendered within 500m of the ground, and just made it look like your ship had an enormous shadow), so they did away with it.

Unrelatedly, that was the first screenshot I ever took of KSP!

[DocLangy]

Wow, look at those icons! Also no landing legs, you've just dated yourself sir!

[Renegrade]

I'd love to have proper eclipse support.. not sure how to do that without weird hacks that would result in strange things.

Ex. you could turn off the Sun's light source, and just leave an ambient light on, but that would make the Sun-facing side of EVERYTHING dark. If you were in orbit and witnessed a Minmus eclipse, Kerbin and the Mun would both go entirely dark, hehe. On the plus side, it would be very inexpensive computationally speaking

http://www.skyrender.net/screenshot0.png

Is it first screenshot time?

Here's mine:

Took me a while to realize there WAS a screenshot button~

(That eclipse does look a bit strange)

Edited January 10, 2015 by Renegrade
URL is working now

[Sirrobert]

Drawing massive shadow is not necessary if you are close to the ground. All you need is to reduce ambient light level.

Ahm! How eclipse is supposed to look from space? Huge moving shadow?

Yup

[SkyRender]

Wow, look at those icons! Also no landing legs, you've just dated yourself sir!

My join date alone did that. Started with 0.11, took my first screenshot in 0.12. Good times.

[Dazpoet]

Hah! I had this problem today aswell. Couldn't understand why I didn't get any electricity from my panels but then I realized Kerbin was blocking my sun