Sudden thought: what if asteroids were very large rocks with days/weeks/months/years of minable ore? To the point it would be feasible to support CORP-sized operations centered around one or two rocks, each separated by off-grid or near-off-grid levels of distance.
Would they still be single-mineral objects?
Would mining rates need to be effected? Ought there be percentage chances of useless ore (non-ore object that fills out the ‘empty’ mass of the rock), whole mining cycles or parts of a cycle’s load that has limited/no use and probably needs to be jetcan’d (effects on drone-mining here)? Rat populations? Rat shipyard activities? Rat mega-raids, and buildup instances that can be suppressed to delay timers/reduce raid size, on corp structures near rocks?
Would there be only as many active rocks as there are belts today? Would there be more rocks? How would respawn mechanics need to be affected? Should asteroids become scan-down objects instead of general system objects? Should the semi-randomised distance between rocks be close enough that stations can support each other if something drops between them? Should it prevent chains of ‘fortifications’? What’s a near-ideal mix between the two?
How badly might it impact PvE/PvP for lone miners? Will this encourage carebear behavior or support micro-raids (is that even possible to dial in?)?
There’s still some nostalgia for large-scale environment objects, so I might as well put this up and see the responses.
this would literally break everything
is it to hard to switch rocks after it is vanished or what is the point?
what next? out jetcan option if the cargo is full?
collecting rocks without targeting them and purely be present near them?
as I said
afk could be exploited even more
it would make mining even lower effort
as a pure atmospheric element this could be nice but that’s it.
and I think ccp already going this way.
maybe it could be possible to implement something like this in low null j
so you have to shoot it first with somewhat to become a regular belt.
and it spawns like ice belts do.
A mid-size between free belts and moons? Maybe it needs strip-miners to “calve off” a mineable belt?
ED: maybe the rock doesn’t regenerate a belt and slowly depletes (thus new rocks that spawn in after one depletes will be hidden among the scannable sites)? special ‘mining crystal’ cutting charges are used in the strip-miners with variants that have better chances at spawning belts with a higher amount of one type of ore in the belt or another? pirate shipyard instances produce rocks that spawn higher-quality belts than normal for the region/system?
