Asteroid Impacts

[travis575757]

It would be great if asteroids could land on the surface naturally without them "disappearing". Then you could send a scouting party to check it out and get samples. Also you could probably get different science from it then a asteroid that has not impacted. Nothing special would be needed for a crater though. Maybe at most just a black spot on the ground.

[TranquilTempest]

I would prefer the asteroids you safely recover give science or money proportional to their mass, and the asteroids be made much more difficult to safely land in order to account for that. For example, dropping their drag a bit, and reducing the impact tolerance so you need to take extraordinary measures to safely land the biggest ones.

[Kasuha]

They don't disappear if you follow them. They don't even explode on impact.

If nothing else, there should be some explosions when an asteroid hits the surface at 100+ m/s and it could perhaps break into a few smaller ones.

[OrtwinS]

Tricky, they'd need to redo the asteroid mechanics.

Currently asteroids are huge single-part objects.

They can't 'fall apart' (unless you want something like them simply disappearing and spawning half a dozen smaller ones).

The huge impact tolerance is to prevent the asteroids from 'disappearing' when we crash our 500 ton tug into it. Lower that and we get people complaining about that...

Hmmm, I do agree, there is room for improvement, but it would need a better idea than I can come up with currently.

[crimsonknight3]

Along the lines of this thread, is there any plans of deformable terrain on KSP? Like perhaps varying size craters caused by debris/asteroid/vehicles collisions?

[Kasuha]

Tricky, they'd need to redo the asteroid mechanics.

Currently asteroids are huge single-part objects.

They can't 'fall apart' (unless you want something like them simply disappearing and spawning half a dozen smaller ones).

The huge impact tolerance is to prevent the asteroids from 'disappearing' when we crash our 500 ton tug into it. Lower that and we get people complaining about that...

Tricky yes, in the sense that no other rocket part behaves like that. But I don't think it would be complicated. Just let the asteroid part explode like any other part including detaching it from all other parts ... and then generate two to four smaller size asteroids within its initial volume and give them some impulse at different directions. They don't have to be attached to anything.