Sorry if this has been mentioned already, but can you please make the NPC's affected by radar limitations before you re-jig said system? It sucks that bots can find you, but you can't find bots...

If you can't find bots, and they can't find you, storms won't really be dangerous will they? Arguably hive bots might all have built-in radar extenders?

Anyhow, I agree that it's not realistic that you can't find bots in storms, but they can find you. But I'm really not sure it would be fun if all encounters in a storm were sheer random luck :p

What about nebulae? Theoretically a system could be built inside a nebulae which as I'm sure everyone here is aware... is just dust.

That would be an interesting dynamic.

I like the idea that mining fog is actally caused by player mining. Here's my take on how this could work. The density of the dust is as Roda says- proportional to the amount of mining being done. The phenomina that causes pilots crossing the sector to come out of warp is related to current mining. For example, more than 44 cu mined in an hour causes the warp barrier effect lasting for an hour.

Linking the mining fog directly to short term player actions is important! Players need to be able to actually affect the VO universe.

I skimmed, but your last statement of "if 44cu mined in an hour causes the warp barrier effect lasting for an hour" is slightly scary. To think of a cu realistically, we could say it is one square meter. Mining 44 square meters of anything would not cause that much dust to cause a huge cloud like that. The material's size would be approximately the size of a house. And dust from that would not be enough to fill a lightyear by lightyear sector, or even produce enough to effect things more that that space junk that already exists would.

If you think about it in game terms, that is an extremely low number too. Unless you want these fogged unpassable sectors to be extremely common, the number should at least be 500cu. Any determined newb could easily mine 44cu within an hour. Most of the ships you would be mining in have a hold bigger than 44cu. One over three times as large.

Hopefully I'm not misunderstanding anything, but this should be considered.

Any newb can mine 44cu in a few minutes.

mining a trivial amount of ore in an area creating a fog would make life real easy for pirates, as well. They dock at a local station, mine a load or two of ore and dump it to then return and wait for a trader would make life harder for traders and miners.

The amount should be a fairly large amount (areas with collector bots would still spawn these dust clouds), but would keep them from being used as traps.Maybe 1000 cu or so?

Starships cross extremely vast distances in a short amount of time, but like any vehicle they still have limits when negotiating difficult terrain. Sometimes the shortest distance to a point is not a straight line. "part of the benefit of fog is that the reduced clipping plane allows me to fill the sector with lots more asteroids." What about other entry/exit points? By linking them together in a system, a downright maze could be created. How fun would it be to hop along these nebulous paths in search for a 'tidal pool' so to speak, filled with delicious cake!

Mynt makes a compelling argument for cake.

It's possible to have more than one entry/exit point, if it were based on the incoming trajectory of the player. The downside is that it makes it less likely for people to appear at given locations.. making the "lie in wait" piracy scheme less effective. Whether or not having say.. four points would be that much worse than two, I don't really know. Depends on player densities, I suppose.

Forming mazes that result in some sort of interesting method of reaching a hidden region.. would be cool. I'm not really sure how that would work with this system, exactly.

Well incarnate, the pirates could hide at the entrance/exits to the maze.

And it would be pretty simple...kinda like having to navigate the system one jump at a time.

Just take the nav map, and turn it into a maze. It'd be really really cool :D

I think that roid heat dissipation should increase proportional to the degree of heat, and that sector smog should dissipate proportional to the degree of smog. This way, a pirate could do some light mining for a few minute of smog, but a single pirate would only be able to create so much smog until the dissipation rate ramped up to mach his output. The dissipation rate can be adjusted depending on how long we think a single player should be able to smog up a sector. Let us say a single player might be able to smog up a sector for perhaps up to an hour, but it might take him so long to create that much smog, as to not be worth the investment. This way, pirate will either have to carry a mining beam with them, or take a break to resmog the sector, etc...

It'd be nice if shooting asteroids increased their heat, or made smog. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Ion storms are great, don't take them away.

Regarding player initiated mining smog: Roda makes an excellent point that the ability to smog a sector sufficiently to cause other pilots to fall out of warp must be achievable with a reasonable amount of work. With the thirty to 50 p0layers we've had online for the past years, it is unreasonable to expect large groups of players to be required to generate this effect. The question then is how much mining must a single player do to cause4 this effect. This pirate might be willing to fill one 'taur to create a smog block. Thus the 44cu. The effect shold be relatively easy to create, and dissapate within the normal attention span of a player - it should last about an hour!

Heres a possible explaination:
Mining releases sub atomic particals that interfere with warp travel. The threshhold to cause a pilot to fall out of warp is low. The half life of the partical is short. Therefore a small amount of mining(44 cu in an hour) will exceed the threshold, and it dill decay exponentially below the threshold in about an hour. Since the decay is exponential, mining a much larger amount of material (say 1000 cu) will only increase the time of the fog block effect by the logorithm of the ammount mined, a short time increase for the fog.

A sector that is not very foggy will have to have fewer roids than one that is permanently quite foggy, if I understand Incarnate correctly. I think that a sector with dynamic fog can have no more roids than the densest sectors we have now.

OK, been going over this some and I have to say DO IT! Only ONE condition :) you must make mining stations produce some fog around them from all the processing they do. Not much but some for cool effects.

I agree with Phaserlight

this all sounds good to me. you know what would be really nice? if my escort jumps out of the storm at the same Storm Exit Jump Point as i do. just a thought.

If you can't find bots, and they can't find you, storms won't really be dangerous will they? Arguably hive bots might all have built-in radar extenders?

I've always believed this explanation. I hope that NPC's simulating humans will have the restrictions if they don't already.

I agree with blacknet. Would add a nice eerie effect to mining in general.

Just wish you could contain it to just around the station, but it sounds like there are some technical issues.