That could work, but only up to certain size (I’d guess about the size of space stations, i.e. a few km across); above that, you need dynamic terrain generation to avoid excessively high CPU or GPU load.
Asteroid rings seem to be rare in real life indeed, and I also am aware of one example only. Asteroid moons, on the other hand, seem to be fairly common (although many of those would be classified as binary asteroids in ED).
As the linked article notes, the data are still patchy, but one would expect them to be more common (by percentage) in the farther reaches of our Solar System, where gravitational disturbances from planets are smaller. Which brings additional problem – most of the asteroid belts in ED are very close to the parent object, so any realistic asteroids there would have very small Roche lobes (or Hill spheres if you prefer
) and thus would be unlikely to have any moons.True, but that applies to ring rocks, too – colliding with them (esp. multiple times from the same angle) ought to cause them to drift slowly relative to other rocks, possibly even collide with other rocks and break apart (now that would be cool, wouldn’t it
). Not modelling such interactions is an Acceptable Break from Reality™, IMHO. Definitely more acceptable than having mined fragments inexplicably slow down and stop in the void of space, as they do I’ll repeat: it was not me. I read about ring rotation on these forums, more than half a year ago, AFAIR. I no longer remember who said that, or if they did any videos. I admit I did not try to verify the claim properly, but it agreed with some not-very-scientific observations I made.
You see, the game sets your frame of reference (FOR) relative to a ring only if you are within a certain distance from the rings’ plane (1000 km, I think, although it may vary with the distance from the centre); if you are farther out, your FOR is relative to the central body, which often means you can see the ring’s rotation. If each ringlet rotated independently according to the (generalized) Kepler’s third law, the rotation should be discernibly slower at the outer edge. (For reference, the orbital velocity of Saturn’s rings – which are modelled as a single ring in ED – ranges from ca. 22.5 km/s at the outer edge of the D ring (which, oddly enough, is the inner edge in ED) to ca. 16.5 km/s at the F ring (which is the outer edge in ED).) OTOH, if the angular velocity of all ringlets is the same in ED, they will seem to rotate faster at the outer edge – which is what I seemed to observe. Granted, it is difficult to get accurate measurements that way, especially since it is difficult to measure the actual distance from a ring.
If someone feels like verifying that, the fastest method is to determine the time it takes the edge of the central planet’s disc (assuming the ship does not co-rotate with the ring while inside it – come to think of that, I haven’t checked if that is the case indeed) to move a certain number of pixels on the screen, both at the inner and at the outer edge. (The edge to be observed should be as close to the centre of the screen as possible, so that perspective distortion does not skew the results.) If the central planet’s angular velocity is the same at both edges, then the ring rotates as a single object.
Ditto. It’s a game, after all; game-play bugs are more important than realism bugs.
