Encountering Random Asteroid Fields = Fun!

[xtoro]

This may have been requested, but my search only came up with people requesting fixed asteroid belts added into the game. I think mine may be a twist on what happens.

If you're as old as me, you may remember the old Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy and similar games where you walk around on the world map and have random encounters with enemies. This is kinda like that. I'd like a mod that can spawn asteroid fields randomly. But I don't mean a fixed belt.

Here's how it would play out:

You're flying your interplanetary mission to Duna, Laythe, Dres, wherever... You leave Kerbin SoI and start time warping towards the SoI of your destination. The asteroid field mod might randomly place an asteroid field somewhere along your path. As you timewarp close to the field, your timewarp goes down to 1x speed, and a warning message pops up that there's an asteroid field dead ahead, and you're about to plow right through it! The asteroids should be somewhat close together (maybe something that can be changed in settings, along with number of roids and sizes) and their paths are all in orbit around the same body as your ship (likely the sun) with near and direct intercepts with your orbital path. Once you make your way through the field and you're clear to start time warping again, the mod would remove all the asteroids from space to prevent KSP having to track more and more objects every time you encounter a field.

This would radically change how you need to design your ships! No longer can you just have some hulk of an interplanetary stage that takes 2 minutes to rotate and has nothing but a super low TWR nuke. Your ship would need to be able to somewhat maneuver itself relatively fast in order to avoid the roids. Or alternatively, you can place engines facing sideways on the sides of the ship to do emergency lateral burns. Or, you can build up some structural shielding and make your ship be able to withstand hitting the smaller asteroids, hopefully without breaking! This would also stop the "timewarp to before SoI and go make a coffee" gameplay. And lastly, it would be the most exciting way to fly your ship manually in space!

Like I said before, this isn't just a "please add an asteroid belt" request. This is a functional intelligent mod that adds some random gameplay and challenges to any interplanetary mission. You could visit several planets and never encounter an asteroid field. But that one time where you're low on Delta-V and trying to get home, BAM! You hit a field and have to do some maneuvers, using up some of your precious last drops of fuel, or try using only MonoPropellant to get through it alive.

The key to my request is: RANDOMNESS

[cicatrix]

Actually, in real life Wikipedia estimates about 1.5 million asteroids in the main asteroid belt that are larger than 1 km (about 0.6 miles). With the total volume of 13 trillion trillion cubic miles, that would about 8 million trillion cubic miles per asteroid. Taking the cube root of this gives a typical separation of 2 million miles, or about 8 times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

Sooo, it's actually very hard to accidentally hit an asteroid in space.

[xtoro]

Actually, in real life Wikipedia estimates about 1.5 million asteroids in the main asteroid belt that are larger than 1 km (about 0.6 miles). With the total volume of 13 trillion trillion cubic miles, that would about 8 million trillion cubic miles per asteroid. Taking the cube root of this gives a typical separation of 2 million miles, or about 8 times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

Sooo, it's actually very hard to accidentally hit an asteroid in space.

Yes but KSP isn't all about being completely realistic. Squad even said it's a game first, a simulator second. There's tons of things that aren't like they are in real life (planet mass vs gravity, atmospheric heights etc etc) but it makes the game playable and fun. The mod I'm requesting would just add more fun and challenge to missions. KSP isn't meant to be taken so seriously.

[RainDreamer]

Considering that an asteroid in KSP is a few KM at most, while the distance that we are dealing with is like millions times of that, an actual (fictional?) asteroid belt might cause some lag if all of them (millions? trillion?) are loaded to fill a whole, dense belt... Otherwise we would end up with just tiny clusters that are just on similar orbits that pass around kerbin once in a while, which is not so different from the stock asteroid generation.

[xtoro]

Perhaps I should clarify that this is to add a bit of fun and excitement to the game, not to add realism... Just random small custers of small asteroids is all I'm talking about... I guess I'm running out of fun things to do.

[hab136]

To clarify, you want a mod to:

1. Randomly drop you out of warp

2. Spawn 30 or so asteroids in physics range in front of you (via Custom Asteroids?), with a small relative velocity towards your ship (coming in your general direction at 20 m/s, for example)

3. Prevent warping again until you get a certain distance from the center asteroid, or leave physics range of all the asteroids, or something

4. Delete the spawned asteroids once #3 is achieved

It's sounds doable - but aside from being horribly unrealistic I also think it would get boring after one or two encounters.

I can already envision a hard mode - where asteroids randomly are created, with random velocities and directions, all the time.

I guess I'm running out of fun things to do.

You can look at other people's missions here and on reddit for inspiration, but if you're just burnt out on the game, then there's nothing wrong with taking a break for a while.