Movable Asteroids

The very first thing that bothered me when I first played Space engineers most of a year ago was how a tiny shard of rock could stop a colliding battleship a hundred times its size cold.
There were two ways I could think of to solve this, one was to make collision damage even nastier. to the vein that a small asteroid would effectively delete blocks on contact at high speeds (simulating the real-world problem of hyper-velocity paint-chips being nastier than bullets)
The second, was to make asteroids movable.
I think a lot of us probably want this.
The ability to find a handily sized asteroid and tow it back to our base for processing. or to bite off chunks of an existing asteroid and do it.
That'd be awesome amirite?
But how to do it?
I'm not that clear on specifics, but it seems to me that we have four grid-systems in the game world.
We have the small ships, large ships, stations and Voxels. If we could somehow allow voxel grid objects to be placed on the grid of Large Ships, give them overall physics properties..we could attach Large Ship components to them directly. we could move them, rotate them, hurl them at our enemies...
This would open up a LOT of possibilities.
1. As described - Asteroid mining would change from burrowing into existing mountain-sized pieces of rock into biting off useful sized pieces and towing them back to a harvesting facility. Much closer to real world harvesting plans.

2. We could hollow out a rock, fit engines to it and use it as an ad-hoc starship (many real world spacecraft ideas revolve around this, it'd be great to be able to do it ourselves)

3. Rogue Asteroids could be used through the existing random ship spawning to provide new hazards, rare materials, visual interest and so on. Picture a 50 meter across boulder passing nearby your base and you and friends hurriedly putting together an investigation mission to a) find out what it's made of and b) to collect it for useful materials
Or perhaps the ship spawning system has placed it directly on course with your station...(Oh no!) and you have to take a ship out to divert its course
4. We could perhaps even build our own asteroids from raw materials, use a boulder to block off the entrance to our cavern space stations for camouflage, make an obstacle course for small-ship fighters to pass through or simply to block an area to large ships.

It opens up the possible scenarios for the game a great deal I feel.
Obviously I have no idea if this is even remotely possible, but given how many things have been achieved by KSWH so far that I didn't know would be feasible...I'll throw it out there anyway!

 

The reason for this is performance. Physics and collision checking is already taking up the bulk of computing power. People with lower-end machines are already having problems. Obviously this game neither is nor should be optimized at this point, but still.

 

And there's gonna be the troll who puts a huge about of rockets on a roid and uses it to destroy other people's bases.

 

Not much different from tossing rockets on a thick slab of armor.

What if you could, by building a station on, say, so sort of costly anchor block that needs to be sunk into the roid (or risk getting sheared off because of reasons), you can turn the whole roid into a station and then that station into a ship?

 

I've never subscribed to the notion that just because something can be abused it shouldn't be available at all...
If it gets abused a lot, find a means of defence.
For example, asteroids as they are can be pretty handily torn to shreds by missiles. I recall my earliest times in SE being spent boring holes through asteroids using nothing but small-ship missiles
That's still firmly possible now and if upon destruction the parts of an asteroid are blown outwards and away, that means relatively little will hit a station, and station point-defence can stop that.
I'd anticipate moving asteroids to be a really power-intensive task. either you put a lot of force in, or a little over a long time. in Survival (where it matters most) it'd be a case of building enough parts to make an entire ship, aiming the asteroid and powering up. half an hour later the asteroid is moving at 30+ m/s and the target player has noticed something is up...
I'm spitballing ideas of course. I'm just rather taken by the idea of using my mining equipment to carve chunks out of asteroids rather than digging ore out of the static voxels directly.

 

Just take the Tauri approach to dealing with huge asteroids hurtling towards your home:

1. land a Goa'uld cargo ship on the asteroid surface
2. modify the hyperdrive of said cargo ship to open a brief hyperspace window to engulf the asteroid and circumvent your fragile base through hyperspace
3. ???
4. profit

 

*does the relative reference frame dance.*

 

*joins the relative reference frames dance*

 

*presses 'Z' while in a relative reference frame and watches everything fly off into the sunset*

Oh, wait, that's not a sunset, that's a death flower.

 

+1 for this suggestion...

 

This is a huge dynamic shift into a more realistic game and should be implemented into the game with it being optional with a check box in the options.

This would greatly increase playability and can be turned off for lower end systems (or saving computer power for other things.

I started looking on here hoping this was already in place or possibly a mod, and even signed up just to post this.

Please implement this!!!