Soo.... Asteroids?

So I heard the devs are working on asteroids and I am curious; what is the difference between an asteroid and a minimum-radius moon? Would the asteroids be even smaller, have some sort of gravity effect or maybe only appear in large belts? If someone or one of the devs please explain what the idea behind asteroids are, I would like to hear it because I can easily make "asteroids" by reducing the radius of moons in the system editor.

I imagine asteroids would not be spherical in shape, would orbit the sun, would be resource rich and be able to be used as weapons.

A minimum radius moon is not spherical, can orbit the sun, can be resource rich and used as weapons?? Any planet except gas giants can have halleys slapped onto them and turned into weapons

I think resource rich as in you can get fabbers to harvest the thing and gradually break down the asteroid. Also, atm, halleys can be too big for a small moon

A moon cannot orbit the sun, this goes against the definition of the word moon. You may think what you're seeing is a moon orbiting the sun, but that's a planet or an asteroid in a moon dress.

i just hope that the commander isnt able to land on the asteroids. Imagine the pain of having to find the enemy commander in an asteroid belt.

As I understand it, that isn't possible : )

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/when-will-asteroid-belts-be-ingame.68236/page-3#post-1076183
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/asteroid-belts.68382/#post-1079151

Another 2 asteroids belt threads

well, i feel like a single nuke could crack an asteroid, and flying through the belt with one asteroid could blow it [the belt] up.

Well a nuke would really do that much to any of the larger asteroids.

But if we are going for an asteroid thicket, id imagine that landing would be impossible as a matter of being poked by a rock with the mass of a continent.

One ding and your commander goes up in smokes.

"A moon is defined to be a celestial body that makes an orbit around a planet"
http://www.universetoday.com/60072/what-is-a-moon/

An asteroid is a small rocky body orbiting the sun. Large numbers of these, ranging enormously in size, are found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, though some have more eccentric orbits.

Well.. uh you're correct, but in PA system designer, you can have moons orbit the sun, which goes against the definition of what a moon is, but again, this is PA where you attach giant rocket thrusters to planets to have them blow up other planets.

I'm aware there have been other threads like this. My reason is that: Whats the point of asteroids? I can make asteroid-like planets easily, which are small, non-spherical and can be put in belts if you're bothered enough.

Depends how they are implemented.

From the snippets I've read over the development, I think the gist of the idea for asteroids is:

- They will be small with relatively low damage / impact zone compared to smashing a moon, and consequently will require much less in the way of engines to move them (maybe a smaller, cheaper version of the halley).
- They will exist in belts (chances are only a few will be available for smashing at any given time)
- They will effectively 'respawn' or at least new parts of the belt will be opened up. This should provide an inexhaustible supply of small rocks to fling around the system and should be a great stalemate breaker.

To note, these were just ideas. Not all of them turned out to be fun, so some were cut out. Still poking at what makes them useful, and looking at some ideas we had earlier in development in terms of smashing in general. Once we have more things fleshed out, we'll start sharing details on it.

It would be really fun, to watch a small dev stream about the ideas you had and those that got dismissed during the process and a lookout to what would be the envisioned mechanic for asteroids. But I guess the danger of people turning every word said into a given promise is simply too high for this kind of things.

While I don't think a stream is the right medium I think one of the reasons why people turn everything into a promise is due to the "hiddeness" of the process of deciding what will be in. If everything would be on the table constantly people would quickly see how unstable the process is. Like this they only rarely see "this is what we want", so they take that as a definite promise, simply due to how rare such statements are.

Ah thanks for the comments, I'll be very interested to see what way you decide to go with them then

I'm not convinced that this is a lack of transparency. I think the issue lies far deeper than this.
Just the fact that this is a product with active development lets people argue about what features there should be in the future releases. First and foremost this is independent of the used development process or its transparency. People want things, and people have expectations.
The problem begins when expectations can not be met (due to whatever reasons), in "normal" development you have the ability to deal with that in a professional way. "Professional" means in this context that at one point in time, the person with the expectation respects the decision that he/she is not getting what he/she wants. Usually this gets ironed out, because it is a finite group of people interacting with each other. (Even in normal circumstances this can get messy. Having a stakeholder that bombards every meeting with a 30 minute discussion about feature xyz isn't funny)
Now imagine the internet, where people don't feel to be oblige to be "professional", where the number of people wanting something is almost infinite. This is the place where discussions about features tend to drag along indefinitely. We all know this to well, basically the discussion goes in circles forever. Someone declares that there is a essential feature missing, then someone else comes along and explains that it is not possible, just to be followed by the next person that declares this feature is important and so on. But in a discussion that goes infinity long, when all arguments that are reasonable are used, people tend to use any argument they can get a handle on, even the absurd ones. (Godwin's law is a corollary to this)
How many threads about shield do we have here?

Actually throughout PA's development I've been interchangeably critical of both Uber and the community for some of the dramas that have cropped up on these sorts of issues. PA is the first game whose development I've followed closely enough to be able to observe and analyse some of the nuances involved with game development and with community interaction.

What I've noticed in my broader experience since then is that these sorts of things are far from unique to the PA community. No matter which game forum you visit, there will always be a number of extremely vocal critics who have a bee in their bonnet about something or other that the developer has done and view it as their moral duty to try and rectify the situation.

At the end of the day, no-one's infallible. Uber have made mistakes in the past - every developer does. I have an entire cupboard full of popcorn ready to crack out for the first big drama that unfolds around Star Citizen, with all those millions of community dollars. Games are something that people feel passionate about, and passion has a habit of pushing emotions out to the more extreme boundaries, both on the positive and negative end of the spectrum.