Frontier Forums

We don't have sexy comets visible in-game but we do have boring old rocks, which are generally cold, hard to spot and could wipe out a settlement.

Meteorite Attack comes in 3 flavours of missions.

1. In-system threat/mining opportunity
   • Detection
     • Discovery scanner
     • Full Spectrum Scanner
   • Interception
     • These things are moving at super-cruise speeds of 1000's of km per second
     • Interdict the rock to safe velocities.
   • Reap the rewards of deep core asteroid mining.
2. High-Orbit threat (timed)
   • A slow-moving asteroid is about to enter orbit.
   • Deep core mining it to bits is the solution.
   • But it's a tumbling moving target with a trajectory. If you tried manually scooping near a planetary body, you know this ain't easy.
3. Low-orbit threat.
   • Prior missions have eliminated the main threat, now there is rubble approaching.
   • Thin atmospheres will burn off the shale, but not the big pieces of rubble. At least they heat up for weapons to detect and have pretty plumes to follow.
   • (Elite) Bodies without atmosphere don't have that protection, and the approaching rubble will be larger in number and coming in cold, meaning gimbaled and turret weapons will be useless.
4. In the event of failure, the facilities shields and weapons (always) protect the people and facilities resulting in casualties, structural damage (economic setback), negative reputation for you and influence for the minor faction who was in-charge. hmmmm that could be abused couldn't it? Damn it!!
5. In the event of High speed, intact large meteorites have a dramatic solution. The superpowers swoop in with a capital ship which then uses it's jump engines to open up a hyperspace conduit to "portal" the meteorite somewhere else.
   Well, that could theoretically be a terrifying mass-driver weapon for the poor souls on the receiving end of that hyperspace-conduit.