> Well, I forgot the stupid speeds at which Honorverse ships move.  I 
> expanded the containment boxes by a factor of 100, increased the sizes of 
> the spheres within by the same factor.  That made the depth from camera of 
> the box 3000 units.  3000 meters, since that is the scale I use for 
> Honorverse ships.
>
> At http://tailkinker.batcave.net/cruiser.avi you will find a rendered 
> animation of a Light Cruiser with your space junk macro in use, scaled up 
> as above.  Note that by the time the Cruiser passes the camera, the space 
> junk is sailing past at speeds high enough to make them irrelevant to the 
> scene.

A real camera does not take a snapshot of an instant in time, it takes an 
average of what it sees over 1/25th second (or whatever).  For most slow 
animations it doesn't make too much difference, but for something like you 
are trying to do you probably need to have motion blur to be able to see 
anything like reality.

> The reason for this is that the Cruiser is moving at 4207 m/s at the time 
> that it passes the camera.

Shouldn't pose a problem to using this method, objects 2 km away that are 
large enough to be visible should take ~15 frames to cross the screen, most 
certainly visible to the camera.  Of course tiny objects are not going to be 
visible that far away, or if they are too close to the camera and crossing 
in less than 2 or 3 frames (in that case the motion blur would make them 
almost invisible).

If I were you, I would replace the "objects" with fake motion blur ones, 
like long stretched spheres/cylinders with varying length and transparency. 
You can probably code how to calculate these values based on the distance 
from the camera.  For some slower moving (in view space, ie >10 or so frames 
on-screen) objects, use real motion blur with more detailed geometry.

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