That was my favorite skybox! Yeah it seems to be missing

Skyboxes are easy enough to change in-game so people who's eyes hurt from bright ones aren't doomed. Just click and unclick the "Use Colored Skyboxes" in the Effects menu until you find the one you want.

Mod time!

You could change it by toggling/untoggling deep-space skyboxes in the Effects menu, there was no need to restart the game.

EDIT: I see this was already said, lol, ignore it then. 

Anyway, i did not like this particular skybox, it was too bright for me. At the same time, i did not like the deep-space one as well, could not see ships there properly. This was thankfully rectified partially with a new lightning system now...

Overall, i think the best skybox currently is the new brownish one. The new purple and blueish are decent as well. but looking at the final version of the trailer, you will see some really BEAUTIFUL skyboxes there, i mean far better than anything ingame, including this new stuff. I wonder why those were not used...probably they were not full 360 maps, or did not have needed resolution. Still, the people, who created those, did a very impressive job, and it is kinda shame, similar amount of effort was not put into creating the ingame ones.

Too bright! I like the darker ones. Space should be dark and moody...

If you want to add realism I think the ships should NOT be phasing when in phase jumping. Nor should have smoke come up from a smoke stack like there is wind in space. Of course, explosions should be much smaller, so would the ships, and the number of crew on them would be numerous.l

It is a game, you really can not expect that much realism from it (unless if it explicitly said that it was supposed to be realistic.). A capital ship, in real life, would not take sixty seconds to build, it would take far longer.

I would what would happen is our universe followed the rules that the universe in Sins of a Solar Empire follows?

he's talking more about the shape of the smoke clouds.... i hope.

Well, for starters... if the nebulae were bright enough to see colors (which I still maintain doesn't happen), I would think that magnitude of radiation would make it impossible for life to exist (via the magnetic field shutting down and solar radiation blasting away the atmosphere, along with enough radiation to kill anything holding an oxygen tank)

Next, if the sun was that small... it might fix the above problem because there's not enough radiation to blast away the atmosphere... but then the planets wouldn't be able to stay in orbit due to the sun not having enough mass... so they'd probably go flying out (assuming they had any trajectory at all... which you would want for the next part). Now, since there is some nuclear fusion going on in the sun, but it's smaller, there's not enough gravity to hold it together and it would just explode.

Before the Star explodes, I'd expect the planets to start gravitationally attracting each other, colliding into one another. The gas (non-)giants would break apart due to planets flying through them since they dont have enough mass to swallow the rocky planets and hold together after such a collision.

resource asteroids would fall to the planet since they're so close. Since they're the size of a moon, they would kill anything on the planet.

The star systems would merge and some would fly off into interstellar space. In the process, some planets would be flung into interstellar space as well, but all alone.

the dumb ship captains that don't think they have to actually orbit planets, they can just 'park' would crash into the planet.

....On the plus side, you could definitely get around the solar system faster... for the 10 minutes it held together/didn't explode/time you could survive the radiation. So... win?

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I too loved that skybox and sorely miss it from the beta. Is there any chance it will be in the final, or is someone going to have to mod it back in?

Its currently in the Trinity game files. No mod has brought it back yet.

This is from the Eagle Head nebula...

            Eagle nebula                                            Horsehead Nebula                                      Cone Nebula

Dude, there are clouds in space.....

Ok, my knowledge of pretend space is a lot more comprehensive than my knowledge of actual space, but I seem to remember that in actual space, clouds like that are so diffuse that you can only see them using a powerful telescope. So if you were inside a nebula, the refracting particles would be so far apart that you wouldn't see anything.

Of course, "vast black nothingness" is a bit lacking as an aesthetic choice in a game. But I always liked it better when the backgrounds are used to evoke the nothingness of space, instead of distracting from it.