Asteroid Belts .......

About 4 years ago when I started exploring in my sidewinder I was scanning everything including asteroid belts ........ until I realised that there was absolutely no reason to scan them and I added them to the filter settings so I no longer see them in the nav panel. But I started thinking about them since the latest updates and the introduction of space worms and other biological's I was wondering if I should be scanning / mapping them. Is there anything in Asteroid belts that are interesting?
 
There's nothing interesting, but you only have to scan one asteroid cluster to get the entire belt no matter how many clusters it has, so I say, why not indeed.
 
There's nothing interesting, but you only have to scan one asteroid cluster to get the entire belt no matter how many clusters it has, so I say, why not indeed.

Do we -know- that nothing interesting has been added to Asteroids, or do we just assume that because they've been completely pointless so far and nobody has found anything to change our assumption yet? Regardless; indeed, why not? It barely takes any time now so may as well on the off-chance there's something there.
 
Do we -know- that nothing interesting has been added to Asteroids, or do we just assume that because they've been completely pointless so far and nobody has found anything to change our assumption yet? Regardless; indeed, why not? It barely takes any time now so may as well on the off-chance there's something there.

They still dont count as part of a complete system scan so i assume they are still as useless as rocks in space
 
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Do we -know- that nothing interesting has been added to Asteroids, or do we just assume that because they've been completely pointless so far and nobody has found anything to change our assumption yet? Regardless; indeed, why not? It barely takes any time now so may as well on the off-chance there's something there.

Mapping on the other hand requires you to be very close and stopped. The scanning part is easy assuming you are scanning the system using the FSS but will that show up a biological or other point of interest?
 
Mapping on the other hand requires you to be very close and stopped. The scanning part is easy assuming you are scanning the system using the FSS but will that show up a biological or other point of interest?

Scanning shows whether or not, and how many, POIs there are - both deep-space ones and surface ones.

Mapping pinpoints -where- they are for surface POIs. Deep-space POIs show up similar to Signal Sources.

Haven't tried mapping an Asteroid Belt yet; doubt you could since there's nothing to aim at; they show up similar to Signal Sources when you target them.
 
Do we -know- that nothing interesting has been added to Asteroids, or do we just assume that because they've been completely pointless so far and nobody has found anything to change our assumption yet? Regardless; indeed, why not? It barely takes any time now so may as well on the off-chance there's something there.

I scanned everything on my recent trip since it's so easy now (also gets them off the FSS). If there's anything to be found in them it wasn't found by the FSS. I wasn't about to drop in on all of them.
 
They still dont count as part of a complete system scan so i assume they are still as useless as rocks in space

Actually, they do. Even though the "system scan complete" message pops up once you finish scanning the planets, it's actually lying to you - you don't actually get the "completed system" bonus payout when you sell the data unless all the belts were scanned too. The completed system scan bonus is 1000 credits per scannable object in the system (including stars) and each belt cluster counts as one object, so skipping the belts can mean you miss out on tens of thousands of credits in completed-system-bonus payments. Not much, given that scanning ELWs nets you hundreds of thousands of credits, but still, it's money down the drain, that could have been collected with very minimal effort.
 
Actually, they do. Even though the "system scan complete" message pops up once you finish scanning the planets, it's actually lying to you - you don't actually get the "completed system" bonus payout when you sell the data unless all the belts were scanned too. The completed system scan bonus is 1000 credits per scannable object in the system (including stars) and each belt cluster counts as one object, so skipping the belts can mean you miss out on tens of thousands of credits in completed-system-bonus payments. Not much, given that scanning ELWs nets you hundreds of thousands of credits, but still, it's money down the drain, that could have been collected with very minimal effort.

Good to know. I sometimes saw it say 100% when asteroids were undiscovered still so i started partially ignoring them.
 
FWIW, according to EDDB, the highest yields of some desirable commodities are to be found in asteroid belts.

I went and had a look but the idea of mining a handful of big rocks, then having to SC to the next cluster, then the next, didn't seem terribly appealing so I went to a ring that had a yield almost as high, where I could zap rocks continuously instead. :eek:
 
They're just astro-spam!
They worth nothing, useless, they just slow your ship down when you fly next to some on SC and they make a mess in the FSS when your pointer goes crazy.
Asteroids belts should be completely redesigned or removed from the game.

If they decide to redesign them then they should put something interesting in them and give some value to their scan. They should be visible as a ring in scan mode, highlighting the hot spots exactly like rings.
Asteroids in real rings are very far apart, it's not like rings. Each rock is many kms apart from another one. But hotspots in the game should look like planet rings, so more dense.
 
You can deep core mine in those belts, only thing they are useful for. No point manually scanning them though, the ship normally auto resolves them anyway.

@SenseiMatty - They have no gravitational effect on the ship in SC, your ship will only slow down if you target a cluster (SC dropout assist)
 
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