Right now, Asteroid Fields are 99% useless. They just don't contain enough ore to ever be worth stopping at.
Why not solve this problem by just making them massively bigger?
This would have some interesting effects. For one, you couldn't supercruise until you left the edge of the asteroid field, so many things could be hidden deep within them, like pirate bases.
For two, it could potentially give great value to high-speed mining ships. If you made the asteroids more profitable towards the center of the ring, then you'd be biasing towards ships that fly fast and could get in there as quickly as possible. This even makes a degree of sense from a physics perspective, as the densest objects would trend towards the center. You could easily have every single rock in the middle have 66% platinum if you wanted, because it would take a big ship so long to get there and then get back out again at the end. Or you could have a massively high core density, one on top of another, allowing for chains of detonations.
Not to mention, it would add some cool visuals, surrounded by dense rocks on all sides as far as the eye could see, fading into the darkness. It would be pitch black in the center, because of all the rocks around you. Great thalassophobia moments are available.
Lastly, you could put resource extraction sites inside. Normal resource extraction sites almost always end up with combat taking place outside the asteroids, which is boring. But here, there would be no 'outside the asteroids', unless you traveled dozens of kilometers. So fighting could remain entirely inside the asteroids at all times, and be much more interesting.
All of this could be possible just by making asteroid belts much larger and denser.
Why not solve this problem by just making them massively bigger?
This would have some interesting effects. For one, you couldn't supercruise until you left the edge of the asteroid field, so many things could be hidden deep within them, like pirate bases.
For two, it could potentially give great value to high-speed mining ships. If you made the asteroids more profitable towards the center of the ring, then you'd be biasing towards ships that fly fast and could get in there as quickly as possible. This even makes a degree of sense from a physics perspective, as the densest objects would trend towards the center. You could easily have every single rock in the middle have 66% platinum if you wanted, because it would take a big ship so long to get there and then get back out again at the end. Or you could have a massively high core density, one on top of another, allowing for chains of detonations.
Not to mention, it would add some cool visuals, surrounded by dense rocks on all sides as far as the eye could see, fading into the darkness. It would be pitch black in the center, because of all the rocks around you. Great thalassophobia moments are available.
Lastly, you could put resource extraction sites inside. Normal resource extraction sites almost always end up with combat taking place outside the asteroids, which is boring. But here, there would be no 'outside the asteroids', unless you traveled dozens of kilometers. So fighting could remain entirely inside the asteroids at all times, and be much more interesting.
All of this could be possible just by making asteroid belts much larger and denser.