I'll shamelessly repost bits of my post from the "External camera for 12 year olds, yadda yadda" threat. Point being: An external camera has nothing to do with arcadey, kiddy or whatever arbitrary negative (to some people, that is) attribute we would like to associate with it. It's in theory entirely plausible and even possible today:Modern high end(!) are stuffed full of cameras and depth sensors all around them to allow for partially to fully autonomous driving. This is visualizes what they "see":[video=youtube;VG68SKoG7vE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG68SKoG7vE[/video]They reconstruct the immediate environment of the vehicle in 3D to navigate through it. Tesla has autonomous driving, Mercedes has autonomous braking including pedestrian/vehicle recogniztion and movement prediction (what I remember from a set of slides in 2013) and is going for autonomous evasion and eventual fully autonomous driving as well. We can probably safely assume that technology in Elite is a bit more advanced then that.If we go to the hypothetical "what if" lore explanation for a moment, a ship might have the same sensor systems +1000 years of improvements. External cameras, depth sensors, lots of processors to measure, reconstruct and analyze its environment. With that data, it's possible to reconstruct a representation of the ships surroundings in 3D. Even todaysdo it after all.From there, "all" it takes to construct an external camera from that is to use the reconstucted 3D environment around the ship, consolidate it with the camera images to add textures to the geometry and render a representation of the ship itself on top of that. The ship will be perfectly able to determine its own position and alignment, if only by continually measuring it's acceleration and movement vector in relation to the environment. What's left is to fill in some blanks where your cameras can't look. Display that image to the gunner, either via monitor, retina projection or holo display and voilà: You have an external view. Add consolidated remote turret control and you have what was shown in the livestream yesteray. A 3rd person view of the vehicle the gunner is sitting in. The science fiction part is the range, framerate, resolution and responsiveness with which all of this happens and how it's displayed to the gunner or pilot.What then is the issue? I don't see why today's tech is too much "high sci-fy" for Elite.For another 3D environment reconstruction with actual images as textures, albeit at a different scale and not in "real time", you can go to Google Maps in your browser (works at the very least in Chrome), navigate to a larger city (Munich works), zoom in, activate the satellite view, hold "Ctrl", left click + hold and drag your mouse: