Maybe add a mechanic for people to lock their ships to the sides of asteroids? I think it'd make mining moving roidd easier and also allow pirates to wait in cool spots =D

+1, except don't permit mining roids you're locked to. Moving roids are <i>supposed</i> to be harder to work with.

Also, this could be general clamps rather than being roid-specific, allowing us to clamp our ship to stations, capships, and wreckage.

+1 let us clamp fighters on our tridents

Note that you shouldn't be able to swap from the cockpit of your clamped fighter into your capship cockpit, and your fighter especially should not benefit from the capship's shields. It would be a sitting space duck, albeit possibly defended by the capship's turrets. The idea is more to allow an escort to ride along without having to get inside and take up valuable cargo space, with the trade-off being that they don't get to operate turrets and their ship is left exposed. Good way to keep the convoy moving if a member needs to go use the toilet for a little bit.

If you cant mine a roid you're clamped on to, then how is it any different than getting real close and personal with a roid and cutting your engines? As long as the roid isn't spinning, it would have the same effect. And a spinning roid obviously isn't the best one to keep a pirate off radar.

Clamping onto capships is a cool idea but probably really difficult to implement. How do you decide how much "area" of the capship is available for clamping on to, how do the different ship models fit onto the cap ship frame, how do you keep the docking bay clear, etc?

Also, think about potential hostile use cases: an enemy could clamp onto your capship, safely out of your turrets FOV.

So? All you have to do to fix that is to find a roid so you can squish them between a rock and a hard place.