Well, we have suns. They provide light and shadow, and all things good for mankind.

Then we have roids. They are pretty dull, cannot be shoved around and are generally only fun for people who don't want to exert themselves too much in order to increase the credits counter.

And then, there's people who like to superheat roids to tempereatures that have long surpassed plasma temperatures.

Now, why not make dark systems, where you can increase ambient lighting by heating up roids? It'd be great, you could have 'cave' sectors, lit by superheated roids, and slaves (read: contractable NPCs) to overheat them.

Great for candlelight dinners.

EDIT:

Forgot to add: Superheated roids would glow like light bulbs, bright white. There could be a gradient in the colour of the glow, much like metal, with dark, dark red, lighter shades of red, orange, yellow, white, superwhite.

Technically if you overheat a roid much a good part of it will become gazified, especialy the ice roids.

But once they heat up to 6000K, they could be balls of plasma, which is heated and ionized gas... also, plasma would be much more fun :)

and it kills you if you get too close instead of doing almost no damage... I could be wrong, but I think super-glowy asteroids is sort of silly...

Forget miniature suns, what we need is mini-golf.

Of course it is silly! But I still think it'd be fun. Oh well.

And it could only be heated up to a certain temperature because you couldn't be far enough from it to use your mining beam and not die.

Since we'd use bots to do it, no matter :P

I think roids should probably change texture/emit light based on how hot they are.. It makes sense that a roid should start to glow as it gets hotter..

It would certainly make it slightly more interesting to visually see the temperature and make it easier to find that rock you were mining a few mins ago :p

I like it. Glow-Roids! Great idea.

Too bad the lighting model doesn't allow objects to emit light, eh?

Yah, nix on the dynamic lightning.

Would be cool someday....

LOl Damnit Roguelazer, ya killjoy... :P

Well... they could probably still glow... just not cast light. Gah, who knows.

maybe explode? and kill all withen 1000m of it? :p

They don't have to really emit light.. They just have to look like they do..

Which is just a matter of having a series of different textures really, since they aren't going to be super bright..

Actually, I think one of the dangers of mining should be unstable roids that explode if they are overheated. Other than bots and pirates, there really isn't much danger or excitement to mining.

It would also limit the ability of users to use mining scripts and the like. If you set a script and go to sleep, you wake up to a 1000k asteroid popping like an egg in the microwave 94m from your ship.

~D.
"Nigel the Indecently Dressed"
"Legin the Naked"