Mon, Mar 8, 2021 at 1:35 PM
Ignatz,
I like the white lights on the tanks. Brighter, and somehow more functional in aspect (whether or not they really serve a practical purpose).
Regarding the red-green-white lights, I think the only way to know if they work is to see how it looks on the model. Though we're thinking in terms of still images, a ship would probably have a few strobing lights on it. But, again, there's a big de-emphasis on piloting-by-eye in this time period.
There could be a number of reasons besides safety, why ships could have certain lighting features. Communication comes to mind; even now, it's quite possible to have ordinary household lights flicker on and off so quickly that we can't even see it happen, but machines can see it. If it blinks in Morse Code, you can talk at the speed of light across empty space. If it blinks in a simple A-B fashion, you have 1s and 0s, meaning digital code. The sensor arrays of these ships include optical cameras that are way more advanced than what we have now. They could easily pick up and decipher such signals from other vessels, even at great distances. Some types of communication could happen entirely by blinking external lights.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we actually incorporate this, I'm only saying that, by this time, they might not need much in the way of external lights for safe navigation. If they have lights on their ships, it might be for unrelated reasons, up to and including simple esthetics.
-David