the asteroid belt in Sol?

I'm curious. How does FDEV plan to depict the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter? Will it be a realistic rendition, or will it be the typical high density 'can't move for blimmin' rocks everywhere' type of approach?

Does anyone have the low down how they plan to do this yet?
 
Considering that we already have planetary rings, I think it would be silly to have the unrealistic asteroid fields.
I would imagine that as you flew closer to an asteroid field in Sc, you would start having markers popping up showing the most important bodies. Some larger ones might actually be ''asteroidal bodies'' that show up independently on the system map, some might be smaller, but every asteroid would be larger than the ones in the planetary rings.
 
I've seen quite a lot of asteroid belts in systems currently available in the Beta. Can we access them in any way (find bodies being part of them)? I must admit I was intrigued by them but too lazy to actually go searching. Most of them seem to appear right next to the star.
 
I am willing to bet that that particular asteroid belt 1000 years from now would have been extensively mined. The majority of the valuable minerals would have been taken leaving behind most of the junk.

A lot can change in a thousand years.
 
If i were FD i would hang on until the DAWN probe reaches Ceres in 2015 and checks out what it really looks like before putting that in game. Would love it to be there though.
 
It is my understanding (probably too much discovery channel but what the hey) that the asteroids in the asteroid belt are actually hundreds of miles apart. This being the case i don't see the benefit of depicting it in game.
 
It is my understanding (probably too much discovery channel but what the hey) that the asteroids in the asteroid belt are actually hundreds of miles apart. This being the case i don't see the benefit of depicting it in game.

Hmmm... You know, I think I agree with you on this.
 
I've seen quite a lot of asteroid belts in systems currently available in the Beta. Can we access them in any way (find bodies being part of them)? I must admit I was intrigued by them but too lazy to actually go searching. Most of them seem to appear right next to the star.

Are you talking about the ones appearing in the system maps? I think you'll find they're not asteroid fields per se, but the rings around certain planets. That's why they're always named things like "Alpha C Ring", meaning the ring around the third planet (C) circling the star named "Alpha".
 
hehehe yep... stolen from the document linked to by Nagual above...

Even with more than one-half million asteroids known (and there are probably many more), they are still much more widely separated than sometimes seen in Hollywood movies: on average, their separation is in excess of 1-3 million km (depending on how one calculates it).

Given that you'll be passing through that area at a speed in the multiples of lightspeed, and that we can't even see enormous space stations from supercruise I doubt the asteroid belt will be modelled. :)
 
Objects on the order of size of Ceres ought to be there; what you'd see with an asteroid belt is a few relatively small bodies sharing a similar orbital distance from the star.
 
Are you talking about the ones appearing in the system maps? I think you'll find they're not asteroid fields per se, but the rings around certain planets. That's why they're always named things like "Alpha C Ring", meaning the ring around the third planet (C) circling the star named "Alpha".

I think I remember at least one belt which was orbiting the star directly. I'm not sure if a star should have something akin to planetary rings. Or maybe my map was incomplete and I didn't see the location of the ring properly. In any case, I'll have to check when I get home.
 
If FD would make it so that unknown but detected bodies do show up on the sensors, then we could fly around in SC and check sensors for any detected asteroids.
The bigger the asteroid the easier it should be to detect.
Also, better sensors would make it easier to detect them.

In this case they could model the Asteroid belts, and similar fields like trojan asteroids, in a realistic way.
Them being thousands of Km apart would be no problem because of our fast movement speed.
When detected we could go closer to scan them like how we scan planets and moons.
This should give us info about the composition of the asteroid which could be sold off or kept for yourself as a 'gold mine' in case it's good stuff.

Comets and rogue planets could be handled the same way.
Although rogue planets can potentially be lightyears away from stars, so they would need to be actively scanned for.
 
Asteroid fields contain gigantic asteroids, and they are miles apart, you wouldn't really see them all that well, and it's definitely not nearly as dense as a planetary ring.

I doubt they will implement it.
Besides we already have them in game.
 
I'm curious. How does FDEV plan to depict the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter? Will it be a realistic rendition, or will it be the typical high density 'can't move for blimmin' rocks everywhere' type of approach?

Does anyone have the low down how they plan to do this yet?

I assume you're talking about the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt?

Well, the rocks in this belt are so far scattered that you'll never notice that you're in it. So it would be pointless to implement it except you want to have a random single rock spawn every 10 years you drop out of SC somewhere in the area of that belt.
 
I'm curious. How does FDEV plan to depict the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter? Will it be a realistic rendition, or will it be the typical high density 'can't move for blimmin' rocks everywhere' type of approach?

Does anyone have the low down how they plan to do this yet?
If I recall, there's actually very little material in this region. It's not like you see in the films with loads of asteroids shoulder to shoulder. I suspect with most of them, they're so far apart, one can't even see another.
 
If i were FD i would hang on until the DAWN probe reaches Ceres in 2015 and checks out what it really looks like before putting that in game. Would love it to be there though.

Sorry but I think this is a bad idea because both Michael Brookes and David Braben have said that we wont be able to visit Sol until the final game is released. If they were to wait for information from this probe then that would mean delaying the release of the game and I and I would imagine most of us would be against that. We want the game as soon as its finished. They could always update the information the Dawn probe finds in an expansion pack or patch.
 
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