I see what you mean. And I am pretty sure maneuring thrusters don't need so much "energy" to counteract impulse one creates with his legs trying to jump from the asteroid surface (in comparison with ship thrusters to counteract planet gravity, especially high G). Maybe in the year 3308 humanity managed to create a system to control propulsion vector if it has systems to produce force field to effectively counteract kinetic damage. I know it is different things, but technologically latter one seems to be more advance. So it just uses the nearest body center of mass to calculate vector in very simple case (some sort of gravity vector amplifier). Even magnetic boots allow one to "run" on the station having no gravity. So what are we speaking about
I can imagine something like this for legs and pointed other direction.
And I am pretty sure if FDev ever decided to develop something alike we discuss, they would find place for any sort of tech to allow moving on the very low or no gravity surfaces of celestial bodies. I like the variety too.
My person opinion on the use of gravity in SciFi games, thrusters, magnetic boots etc falls somewhere between two extremes used in some of the most popular SciFi movie franchises, you can go all of nothing.
The extremes I refer are the Star Trek type extreme at one end where everything is artificial gravity, even the smallest shuttles have artificial gravity..something that's almost pointless in vehicles that are only intended to move you from one large ship to another, why bother with that complexity if all you do is sit down and wait to get to the next area of artificial gravity, would you bother? But of course for sequences where they take place in shuttles trying to mimic zero gravity would be a pain, so basically it's everywhere and "never" fails, even when the ship is about to blow up the gravity still works, that's the one extreme.
The other extreme is of course the Star Wars one, where question of gravity are simply'..."ignored" for the purposes of drama and action. For instance in that sequence where they are fighting in the ship and it tilts sideways and they all start sliding down the floor, even though all ship must have AG because that's how it work in space. It should, even when the ship is tilted, hold them orthogonal to the floor surface but it's far more exciting having them slide everywhere.
In Ed we already move on surfaces with low gravity, many small moons have nearly zero gravity, when you are on a body with a radius of 127klm radius there's a lot of zero's in that gravity measurement, they are in fact smaller than some of the asteroids in our asteroid belt, but the things we are discussing here, the size of them, have effectively zero gravity, none at all, you won't be held to them by gravity, you won't feel any gravity floating next to them. There's no point in mimicking walking on them, and thrust from your jet pack is going to have to be more than a tiny thrust to actually allow you to walk on them, it's going to have to be continuous and enough to mimic gravity of a largish object. In fact the rotation speed of many of them means you would actually have to have a greater thrust because you are already over escape velocity just moving with them due to the rotational speed, and your jet pack will have to match that as well!
This is why I suggest you are better off tying down with a tether of you really want to do that, it creates the necessary method to stand on an asteroid without a lot of mucking about, otherwise you could just float next to them and mine from there, but you would have to pick one with almost zero rotational velocity, some of them move quite fast.
Bringing in magnetoic boots on stations and running around is irrelevant because that is the part where FDEV go full Star Wars and ignore the gravity problem altogether because it's to difficult and would be a pain for players, just ignore it and it will go away! But EVA in space I think should be strictly, this is zero gravity and this is how it works, players would expect it to work like that.
