How about making some giant roids in some sectors, with lots of tunnels in it with several exit entrances dead ends fer dog fights / miners hide and seek.
Tunnels should be obscur unless ye got some luminescent ore veins like Xith, and either ye need to equip lights addon or ye need to fire lazer to see shit inside.
and add some big caves as well!

Hmmm, I kind of like this idea...

+1, and add fog to such sectors to ;)

+1 heck yeah. Let's get some Descent-esque combat going here. There's already a few of these, but most are stations in nation space.

We probably have some pretty interesting asteroid fields already, except we have no reason to ever go near them and most of us (myself included) consequently don't even know they exist.

I think we probably need more reason to visit asteroid fields and other environments first. Like having special stations hidden inside some huge asteroids (deep inside, not like the ones we have already, and with a small NFZ radius to avoid discouraging combat), or special item/bot spawns like some of the exploration suggestion threads have talked about.

If AI flight could be improved, there could also be vast tunnel-ridden asteroids infested by hive with a militant queen or two roaming the tunnels killing anything that gets in front of her. The tunnels should be wiggly enough that it would be very difficult to employ stacking, so that people are encouraged to either work together or flee to safer tunnels. Hidden somewhere inside would be transport ships with a lot of good cargo inside them, ripe for the looting.

Deneb could also factor into this, with new types of skirmishes. There could be king of the hill type battles over factories embedded in the rock, not to mention millitary-owned conquerable stations within asteroids (which would make sense - safer).

This is something I want, and have been working towards for a long time.

On a kind of "bigger picture" level, you could say that my main goal is "creating reasons to go to interesting places and do things". Of which denser locations like this could be one.

We have some technical challenges that we've been working on to help enable this. Plus, issues like "wingbugging" would become far more prevalent in an enclosed environment.

There may be some content that implements parts of what you guys are talking about, sometime before the end of summer.

"On a kind of "bigger picture" level, you could say that my main goal is "creating reasons to go to interesting places and do things". Of which denser locations like this could be one"

I always thought this was why xith rocks were at certain sectors in big quantities and thus, mining was there so people had reasons to go to dangerous places, but i support this suggestion because it obviously can be done better and on a larger scale.

+1

Maybe another ConqStation deep inside a "swiss cheese" roid, nothing visible from outside. Turrets spread inside tunnels, or attached to its walls, or very very close to station.

Also. every mining station should be attached to a huge roid.

We already have some "cheetos tunnel" roids, even on training sectors. Make more of them, bigger and more complex.

Another simple idea: Add some very rich and small roids inside the existing mega-fractured roids.