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Originally posted by Burning cow:
**This is a really cool idea. It would bring a whole new level to asteroid mining in EVN. This would make it far harder to make so much money by mining. Its a nice idea.
The asteroids in FH were good and damned annoying but who cares, i never needed to go to jupiter.
---Burning cow---
**
You want a fun asteroid field? Here are two ideas from the world of SF;
Hole-hunters (Larry Niven, John Varley; esp "Ophiuchi Hotline," "Tar-Baby.") Primordial black holes; holes just over the Hawking limit (down to a few hundred kilograms) were formed in the first nano-seconds of the universe and now drift aimlessly through space. Hole-hunters are asteroid-miner types who seek out these dangerous near-invisible beasts, capture them with magnetic fields, and tow them back for use in power generators, starship drives, weapons, etc.
In EV terms, these would be invisible but very hostile objects that needed to be "neutralized" (disabled) before capture. Watch that Hawking limit, though; let the mass of the hole drop too low and it will explode quite messily in your face.
The Seetee Drift (Jack Williamson; "Seetee" and "Seetee Shock.") Instead of the weighted dice of our universe, in which most matter is "ordinary," this universe has a significant amount of antimatter (also known as contra-terrene, or CT, hence Williamson's nomenclature). The "Drift" is a dangerous mix of ordinary matter asteroids from which valuable resources are being mined, and "seetee," which looks just like ordinary matter but will vaporize you if you touch it (also releasing tremendous amounts of raw energy and hard radiation). The ordinary asteroid miner lives in fear of the day they snag the wrong rock. The truly daring miner goes after seetee by preference, even though the government has declared all seetee objects off-limits and experimentation with the deadly stuff is a treasonable offence.
In the simplest terms, one out of twenty asteroids would be a "killer asteroid," but more interesting to work out mechanics to make the things explode violently. I can see luring a hostile fleet into the drift, and perhaps shooting an iron pellet at a seetee rock yourself as the battleship cruises nearby...
In both cases, there are plausible mission strings in which the player, using experimental technology, brings back one of the interesting objects to a research group who then spawns powerful new drives and weapons...
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You see a Grue.
