(Was going to post this in 'bugs', but it's not really a bug as most would think of it.)

As it stands, you can mine a roid to as hot a temperature as you are willing to wait for, possibly up into the thousands of degrees K. However, there is a scientific problem with this... at some point, the roids are going to melt! Iceroids will melt somewhere below 373K (not sure of the exact numbers) and normal ones will probably not last up into the 1000K area.

Perhaps the mining beam should auto-shutoff before the roid gets to its melting point?

(And I know they won't technically 'melt', they'll sublime straight to gas phase... but the net result is the same... no more solid roid :))

Btw, an infrared display mode would be really really cool ...

fyi the unofficial record is 110,000 kelvins.

someone has too much time on there hands if they got one that high up

i thought it was 200,000K, thats what i heard on chat the other day, don't know who...

it would be nice if the 'roids would vaporize/explode/etc., and then re-spawn somewhere else in the sector later...maybe with a different chemical make up, mass, or even quantity (wouldn't it be cool if one spawned into two new ones every time? we'd populate the busy sectors! LOL!). This would possibly "clear" the immediate area of stations and cause the rest of "wasted" space to be explored, used, or otherwise noticed.

i think it would make more sense to have your ship get damaged once it passes some number. think about it this way.... the roid is at 4,000 kelvins. you mine it. that means you are taking material that is at 4,000 kelvins and brining it into your ship in little crates. at some point your ship and/or the crates will begin to melt or catch fire. unless they all use some kind of electromagnetic containment device.

If Steel melts at 1400 Celsius, which is about 1700 kelvins.... what does the Xirite Alloy melt at? What exactly are the ships cargo containers and hull made of anyways?

Check out this site:

http://www.kitco.com/jewelry/meltingpoints.html

The highest melting point metal on that list is
Molybdenum at 2600C, or 2873 K.

unfortunately your list does not list ALL metals. Wouldn't the material cool just a bit as it's vaporized and sucked in through the cold vacume of space? We can always come up with excuses as to why things work or don't work. This games physics are not based totally on reality. I do think though that there should be a point at wich the roids are unminable and there should be advers effects for going over them such as roid expodes and you take frag damage, or your collector beam overheats from the temp and shuts down, possible hull weakening from remaining too close to a hot roid too long. I'm sure that the devs have something in mind, it's just that they have not gotten around to it as of yet.

I think the temps just need tweaking. Make the base roid temp still 10k, but make the roid temp increase about 1/1000 its current rate, and make rate decrease in proportion(so the mining process still slows down at the same rate).

This way the 200,000k roid would only be 200k, which is nowhere near the melting point of any of the substances these roids are made of.