Hotspots should be rerolled periodically

[sidereal6]

There is no universe in which I support rocks moving through asteroid belts at more than a rate of a few kilometers per thousand years relative to other close rocks

Well, you're just wrong. There's no other way to put it. I respect your opinion that you don't want this feature in the game, but you're wrong that rocks in rings remain close to each other for thousands of years. They are constantly being mixed up and moved around.

Do you think that asteroids in solar orbit "stay within a few kilometers of each other for thousands of years" - because you'd be wrong about that too. Oh sure, there are specific areas like lagrange points where rocks might congregate, but in general those orbiting the sun are constantly mixed up and moved around.

Known Near-Earth Objects Through 2015 GIF by Dave Mosher | Gfycat

Watch and share Asteroids GIFs and Astronomy GIFs by Dave Mosher on Gfycat

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[Aashenfox]

Well, you're just wrong. There's no other way to put it. I respect your opinion that you don't want this feature in the game, but you're wrong that rocks in rings remain close to each other for thousands of years. They are constantly being mixed up and moved around.

Do you think that asteroids in solar orbit "stay within a few kilometers of each other for thousands of years" - because you'd be wrong about that too. Oh sure, there are specific areas like lagrange points where rocks might congregate, but in general those orbiting the sun are constantly mixed up and moved around.

Known Near-Earth Objects Through 2015 GIF by Dave Mosher | Gfycat

Watch and share Asteroids GIFs and Astronomy GIFs by Dave Mosher on Gfycat

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Asteroids in solar orbit are further apart than the earth and the moon as a rule, and follow their own orbital trajectories around the sun, almost never colliding and bear almost no shared physical property, similarity or relationship with a planetary ring, bar the fact that they are space debris. I know for a fact that you are wrong about heliocentric asteroids they are extremely well mapped and very rarely do we lose track of one due to a collision, and I believe you are wrong about planetary rings rock movement as well, despite their being two completely different and basically unrelated phenomena. What I really think you're failing to grasp is the sheer size of these hotspots and how long it would take before materially it wasn't a hotspot any more due to random drift.

 

[varonica]

Not really exact. In rings some other effects happen. Uranus & Saturn rings are examples of "no easy explain". For example, wave equations may work there, as all that ring together works as whole system and not single rock.

True, I did mention that earlier, effects of gravity, extreme electromagnetic fields, many things affect the rings, even for individual objects standard orbital mechanics don't take into effect Einsteinian relativity, so orbits of artificial satellites aren't perfect and always need adjusting, but for us humans they are usually good enough. In ED a ring system is an extremely basic model, so basic it doesn't model the orbits of individual objects in the ring. Any adjustment of hotspots would be purely random because there's nothing to base the location calculation on, and that's not a good way to go.

 

[varonica]

Well, you're just wrong. There's no other way to put it. I respect your opinion that you don't want this feature in the game, but you're wrong that rocks in rings remain close to each other for thousands of years. They are constantly being mixed up and moved around.

Do you think that asteroids in solar orbit "stay within a few kilometers of each other for thousands of years" - because you'd be wrong about that too. Oh sure, there are specific areas like lagrange points where rocks might congregate, but in general those orbiting the sun are constantly mixed up and moved around.

Known Near-Earth Objects Through 2015 GIF by Dave Mosher | Gfycat

Watch and share Asteroids GIFs and Astronomy GIFs by Dave Mosher on Gfycat

gfycat.com

You can't compare asteroids in orbit around the sun with objects in a ring, that's extremely silly. Rocks in rings aren't "constantly being mixed up and moved around" because there are constraints on where and how far they can move, they don't call shepherd moons shepherd moons because they look like shepherds you know!

 

[Sysmon]

And the truth shall set you free (or some quote to that effect, lol)

This I agree with. But I feel it needs to be a shorter time than a month. Like once a week with the server tick maybe. Should shake this up abit. I suspect some miners may not agree and also the DSSA wouldn't be too happy about it.

It would indeed be a bit silly to have hot spots come and go based on time rather than on activity. I'm happy with the current situation, even with the survey scanner thingy that magically light up rocks that may or may not be interesting. After 9 years working in mineral exploration, I can easily imagine that as being as good as it will ever get.

S

 

[badibeat]

Why would anyone want to discover something that is vanishing soon-ish? Writing poems and releasing them to the wind? Sounds extremely late-game to me.

 

[Brrokk]

Even if all the rocks were moving in perfect circular orbits, not colliding, not exerting forces on each other and not perturbed by moons*, their orbital periods would be proportional to R^(2/3) where R is their distance from the planet. In other words, they'll have widely different orbital periods and any circular "hotspot" should be quickly smeared out into the whole ring.

* There's evidence that "shepherd moons" just inside and outside the ring are crucial to keeping all the rocks in place, by continually mixing them around the ring plane.

Now that I'm started, another ridiculous thing in ED is close-pair gas giants orbiting each other and both having rings. Those rings should be ripped away by tidal forces.

 

[RamirezKurita]

Even if all the rocks were moving in perfect circular orbits, not colliding, not exerting forces on each other and not perturbed by moons*, their orbital periods would be proportional to R^(2/3) where R is their distance from the planet. In other words, they'll have widely different orbital periods and any circular "hotspot" should be quickly smeared out into the whole ring.

To be honest, this is the reason why I feel that RESs and hotspots in their current incarnation are ridiculous and are in need of a rework. On any stellar time scale any large region would naturally smudge itself across an entire ring.

However, that's not to say that a given ring would be entirely homogenous. A "hotspot" structure could exist on a reasonable time scale as long as it is all perfectly in the same orbital path, where it would be defined by a distance from the host planet as a thin arc rather than by a circular pattern that we currently see. Players hunting through a hotspot that is several megametres in length but less than a kilometre wide would present quite an interesting challenge and wouldn't necessarily overshadow other prospecting techniques. Such a structure would be eventually broken up over a period of millions of years, but they could quite easily form from the breaking up of large asteroids, moons or planetoids. This probably wouldn't even need a designated "hotspot" mechanic, as they could just implement a mechanic wherein a ring's composition varies with altitude from the planet that a player could scan for - the desirable "hotspots" would simply be altitudes that are rich in valuable resources and low in worthless ones.

On a finer scale, there might be highly localised regions of higher concentrations just by random distribution. If each asteroid in a belt follows a normal distribution of minerals, it is entirely possible that a cluster of a particular mineral occurs together for a brief period. This is why I'd argue that RESs should be more like USSs in that they are continually spawning and despawning on an hourly/daily basis.