Game uses teleport to move stuff around, I seen it yesterday by chance. I was using See Start Stuff ability on my ship (that lets me see through walls) and I noticed how suddenly one of my companions teleported from same deck I was on through walls to deck above me LOL
They do same shit with ships but hide it with that short animation of travelling and short fade to black.
If you're fast traveling, sure, whatever, but why? Why skip on proper space travel and exploration? Atmospheric flight, persistent planets, those would've present some technical challenges, but freeflight inside of a star system wouldn't have and now we can see that they
made the spaces, they just chose to skip on building gameplay for them. Random encounters and bespoke quests taking you into deep space, shipping lanes, secret pirate stations, whatever, there should've been stuff to play with over there. You should've also been able to freefly to a planet's orbit and then get the landing menu.
And no, modders won't be able to fully fix this. Once Todd deigns to release the CK to the plebs, they'll be able to make smooth deep space freeflight and maybe even tie random encounters and "radiant" quests into it, but it'll never reach the level it would've if it'd gone through development proper.
I thought that maybe Bethesda made a major mistake early in development and created planetary orbits as isolated, individual worldspaces, but no, they were correctly compartmentalised around their respective stars. You
could've had deep space gameplay, you
should've had it, but you
don't. And this is the game we got
after Microsoft slammed the breaks and had Todd "polish" it for another year. Fuck's sake.
There's also a set of hotkeys for slowing down and resetting the current scene (to fix the problem of planets not loading).
This together with what was earlier discovered regarding trying to get to New Atlantis from a landing site just outside of it via cheating/console haxx, strongly points to Bethesda being unable to implement proper seamless loading. Now you could think space is way easier to do seamlessly than planetary scale terrain for on foot travel, but the way easier part is relative. I know KSP for instance had quite a few problems before their seamless solar system started working, although granted it does have seamless space to surface transitions (and better ones than NMS because loading is much faster and with no tricks to slow down the landing).
But this was the game, man, it's what it should've been. I'm not surprised that star space is buggy
now, since deep space flight isn't a game feature so no one would've cared about it screwing up behind the scenes, but we're not talking about a complicated technical concept here. Dunno about KSP but NMS (as much as I love shitting all over it) does atmospheric flight and seamless landings, asset streaming is a major factor, but Starfield's would've just been a big map with a space skin. If Gamebryo can handle Fo4's Commonwealth, it can handle a big, black space with a bunch of globes strewn about.