As I was mining the other day, having plenty of time to ponder, I had some ideas.
What if asteroids had finite amount of minable material, but fixed percentages, such that the issue of the original mining exploit of re-logging into a different instance to refresh available ore (which was fixed by making ore randomly generate at each instance) would be mitigated by the fact that any given asteroid would only supply X tonnes before being rendered 'empty', at which point it would not generate ANY fragments...for anyone. This would eventually result in asteroid belts being 'mined out', of course, and that would be a primary drive for exploration and expansion into the galaxy. It'd take a while to mine out a planetary ring, though.
Such an approach would open up gameplay avenues like being able to stake a claim on a particular patch, dropping a beacon to find a particularly rich asteroid again, 'claim jumping', needing to protect your claim from said, hiring security to do this task for you, finding a rich section of resources and selling part or all of that claim for much more than you paid for it...et cetera.
Also, presently asteroid belts are presented as clusters of asteroids at scattered locations around the star. I've not delved into many USSes, but a potentially interesting content for a USS to have would be a single asteroid which isn't part of a preset cluster but represents the myriad bits of rock flying around space on their lonesome?
What if asteroids had finite amount of minable material, but fixed percentages, such that the issue of the original mining exploit of re-logging into a different instance to refresh available ore (which was fixed by making ore randomly generate at each instance) would be mitigated by the fact that any given asteroid would only supply X tonnes before being rendered 'empty', at which point it would not generate ANY fragments...for anyone. This would eventually result in asteroid belts being 'mined out', of course, and that would be a primary drive for exploration and expansion into the galaxy. It'd take a while to mine out a planetary ring, though.
Such an approach would open up gameplay avenues like being able to stake a claim on a particular patch, dropping a beacon to find a particularly rich asteroid again, 'claim jumping', needing to protect your claim from said, hiring security to do this task for you, finding a rich section of resources and selling part or all of that claim for much more than you paid for it...et cetera.
Also, presently asteroid belts are presented as clusters of asteroids at scattered locations around the star. I've not delved into many USSes, but a potentially interesting content for a USS to have would be a single asteroid which isn't part of a preset cluster but represents the myriad bits of rock flying around space on their lonesome?