I would like to see roid fields that are so far away from the "center" of the sector that you would need a special scanner to find them. On top of that say 70% of those roids would be worthless so you would need to scan the roid itself to determine if it had anything valuable in it.

So say in sector x, there might be a good 100 roids in the central cluster, of those 100 perhaps only 30 would be valuable. But if you have the right skills, equipment, and patience you could find a far away roid belt full of valuable minerals.

I also feel that very few ships should be able to mine, they would have to be highly specialized ships designed for mining and nothing more. Basicly I would like to see mining as a group activity, one person mines, another person in a freighter holds the cargo and transports it, and if pirates are about, a few fighters for defense.

I would like to see a ship that instead of mining a roid on the spot it flies around attaching supports to it and then grabs onto it and tows it to a mining facility.
Expensive but safe.

SL I like that idea, but I have a few questions:

Do new roids spawn over time? Otherwise you will eventually have a universe with no roids left.

If new roids spawn, how would this be implemented? It would be kinda wierd to all of a sudden see a large object appear right in front of you.

hmmm, I suppose the options are:

1. "drift" new roids in from the edge of a sector.
2. respawn randoml - hopefully when no one is looking.
3. mined roids are gone and never respawn. Instead, major events - the discovery of a new sector, or perhaps a rogue planetoid comes in and is destroyed forming a new belt.

Lets say asteroid rich sectors are created randomly, but the wormhole collpases after after a set amount of time, after awhile another asteroid rich sector is created and people rush to rob it of its goods. (rinse and repeat)