I'm very curious how water and LOD work in Skyrim. Oblivion has a fairly straight forward system for both of these things but Skyrim remains a convoluted mess for me. I've searched around the web for both mods and tutorials in my quest for understanding but many questions remain:

My interest in this subject is simple- I want to make a new water mod, or at the very least implement additional reflections- beyond even those in the default INI. I've had (possible) moderate success with that last, which I'll share in due time. What I need in the meantime is a better understanding of Skyrims implementation of these two systems and how they interact.

I've had a look at Water Reflection System by 3AMt and I gather that the reflections are enabled by ticking a certain tag in the object properties window in the creation Kit regarding the map. I know the map uses LOD. What I don't know is why that works- it's obvious that Skyrim normally does not reflect objects in the water which are in the currently loaded cells- only LOD- so how does this mod bypass that?

For that matter can anyone hazard a guess why Bethesda switched systems? in Oblivion everything in the currently loaded cells reflected- with only LOD Land and LOD Objects reflecting beyond. The LOD trees do not reflect. In 3AMt's implementation of local reflections local trees do not reflect- but objects do.

Can someone Explain the Water LOD bug to me? Oblivion and Shivering Isles especially could also have this issue- where huge squares of LOD water would disappear. I've even seen high configure machines with this problem. Does water LOD get packaged with other LOD files for each region?

How exactly do reflections get implemented in Interior Cells? I've searched for tutorials all of which say it's obvious- not having the CK in my hands currently it's hardly obvious to me- is it all in flags of the object properties? Or does it have something to do with the imagespace for each cell- I've noticed that mods like ELFX implement new reflections which leads me to the latter conclusion.

Why is Blackreach bugged in terms of enabling reflections?

Can someone list me the various types of assets in the game- this could be useful for reflections. I.E- what are the names of the various light types (shadow casting, flickering etc...)?

On a Different tangent- I put a lot of effort last year studying the water from Crysis and Assasin's Creed Black Flag. They use something called Fast Fourier Transforms- a very complex set of equations, in addition they have a series of height maps. Using a random number generator that is then fed into a fast Fourier transform they can modulate that height data to produce the 3d waves you see in those games. My question has to do with hooking and with depth buffer information- I know that post process injectors like reshade and ENB can expose depth buffer information- I'm wondering however if there is a practical way to completely hijack the water rendering system to render 3d waves. In Morrowind MGEXE does this- but if I'm not mistaken includes its own dedicated renderer for Water and LOD which is overplayed on top of Gamebryo. I don't have the coding chops to create an external renderer- whatever solution must be a post process injection.