What the heck guys!? Obviously it's... (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, November 21, 2017, 01:40 (2361 days ago) @ RaichuKFM

To see something, you need to be able to receive light radiation which is either generated by or bounced off of the thing that you're seeing.

For objects moving slower than the speed of light, you would see the light first, and then see the object. For objects moving faster than the speed of light, such as the traveler's pulse as seen in this cutscene, the pulse would hit you first, and then the light would catch up to you, so the actual visual effect would be that it would look like the light was receding away from you as the light from farther and farther away reached you.

Now, if the expansion took place on a plane (we know this one doesn't, but hey - it's kind of represented that way so I'll go with it), you *could* see the light as expanding if your viewpoint was perpendicular to the plane of expansion. BUT in order to see a galaxy-size pulse from far enough away that you could see the entire milky way in your field of view, you're talking hundreds of thousands, if not millions of light years, which means it would take an equal amount of time for the light to reach you.

These two facts make the visual representation weird to me.

Yes, you can always hand wave this and just say "magic" or "artistic license" and those are both valid answers. To me, validity notwithstanding, they are wholly unsatisfying excuses for what appears to be lazy storytelling. To be clear: I don't expect anyone to provide a satisfactory answer here. Even Bungie saying "yeah, we goofed" would not satisfy me, even though it would be confirmation. I'm only pointing out that this was not well done. It looks like a cutscene someone made 10% of the way into the game to illustrate roughly what they wanted to have happen at the end, and then no one bothered to fix it. If that's good enough for everyone else, so be it; I'm in the minority here.