Okay one of you smart people, how can they see ships?

You can see satellites and whatnot, can't you?

RIP Gene Wilder. RIP Barbara Hale. You were great in Perry Mason. RIP William Christopher.

Turn off you computer monitor and what do you see?

A curved glass surface if it is really old. Or a dull flat surface.

Then turn it on. When I go to bed at night I turn off my computer and then turn off the light. And my computer screen glows blue and blank for a few minutes before shutting off so I use the light from it to see as I go to bed and get under the covers. In fact the light from the computer screen is too bright to fall asleep by until it shuts off after a few minutes to save energy.

Once I read the novel Mission to the Stars or the Mixed Men (1952) by A.E. van Vogt in which the mighty space battleship Star Cluster has a lot of advanced features that the Enterprise would envy. And a comparatively minor technology made a big impression on me.

In one scene the grand captain of the Star Cluster looks at herself in a mirror in her quarters, then uses a control to turn the mirror surface into a view screen. And I always wondered how a mirror surface could turn into the equivalent of a television screen.

1) Maybe the mirror surface and the view screen surface are two separate surfaces and one slides in front of the other when the function is changed.

2) Maybe there are one or more video cameras mounted by the screen and when it is in mirror mode they film what is in front of them and display it on the screen.

3) I once read about a display technology that has millions of tiny particles suspended in the screen. These microscopic particles are long and narrow. A magnetic field changes their orientation. When the particles within a pixel have their long sides facing out they block what is behind them. When the particles within a pixel have their narrow sides facing out the different colored background behind them is visible. And so an image is formed from millions of pixels.

And maybe the same process is used in the outer layer of the grand captain's view screen. Maybe it has millions of long narrow microscopic particles that are highly reflective. Maybe when the narrow ends of the particles are facing outwards she can see around them to the viewscreen behind them, and when the long sides of the particles are facing outwards they make a mirror surface.

Another story by A.E. Van Vogt "A Can of Paint" (1944) involved a super advanced type of paint that glowed, came in all colors, and spread itself.

I have read speculation about intelligent paint that would have tiny nanobots in it that could respond to instructions.

Present day advanced paint include a transparent varnish that turns pink icy conditions that could be used to warn drivers about ice on the road.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13592-intelligent-paint-turns-roads-pink-in-icy-conditions/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHBqVAxp7T8

Someday advanced paint like surface coatings should be developed that will be like paint on computer screens or televisions. You will be able to paint on a surface and send signals to the surface to change it's reflectivity, color, and brightness in various areas and make it display any image.

And if starships are painted with such paints it would be easy to increase how much light a portion of the surface reflects or emits. Note that the starship Yamato appeared in 2 episodes of TNG with 2 different registry numbers. If it was painted with some futuristic intelligent paint it would be easy to switch from one registry number to another at the press of button or program it to periodically switch the number.

It is natural to assume that starship hulls don't glow with their own light, but considering all the advances in display technology in our lifetimes, it is perfectly possible that the surface of a starsip is one vast computer display that can emit light and make itself visible even in the depths of interstellar space.

And what about the "stars" seen streaking by when starships are at warp speeds? calculations show that starships can't travel fast enought for that effect. Therefore some speculate that the streaks are tiny particles of space dust that are heated up and glow from the warp field of a starship. If there are enough tiny glowing dust particles around a starship it might be illuminated as much as in Star Trek.

And possibly the strange physics of a warp field might cause photons of light to appear around a starship, possibly enough to illuminate it.

But it's for my story.
And I was having the kids and people look out the windows of the space station.
But then it occurred to me that without light, how the hell would they be able to see the ships docking or anything really
Other than if there was docking lights.
But even then, if the ship was huge, only the dock area would most likely be lit, so you still couldn't see anything.

May be I can have the space station near to something that gives off light.....,
But since I never paid attention in school, I don't even know what that could be🤔
Possibly reflected light from a moon???🤔
No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed

I doubt that very much.

I have a brain and good taste, so no, I'm not part of the target demographic.

Yeah...it's the end of an era. I liked most of the people on here. I think it sucks that they're getting rid of it because it lets people know what people really think of movies as well as TV shows.