09-23-2016, 09:42 AM
No, you won't be able to hollow out asteroids — you'll be able to mine them for materials, and turn them into habitats.
I'm very skeptical that most (any?) asteroids would be strong enough to stay together if you spun them up to 1G (or even much less). Most of them are loose aggregates, as you said. Gravity holds them together, and pseudogravity in the other direction would tear them apart.
If it were a very metal-rich asteroid and you melted it (perhaps with a giant parabolic mirror), and then inflated the molten metal like blowing a glass bubble, then maybe you could get it to hold together... but I still think you'd be better off just turning it into beams, girders, and other parts with which to build a standard colony.
(Note that in the game, all this mining activity happens in the background — we'll just apply it to the local cost of materials, which will be cheap for anything you can get from the asteroid. This is the same sort of thing we do when you build around a planet or moon.)
I'm very skeptical that most (any?) asteroids would be strong enough to stay together if you spun them up to 1G (or even much less). Most of them are loose aggregates, as you said. Gravity holds them together, and pseudogravity in the other direction would tear them apart.
If it were a very metal-rich asteroid and you melted it (perhaps with a giant parabolic mirror), and then inflated the molten metal like blowing a glass bubble, then maybe you could get it to hold together... but I still think you'd be better off just turning it into beams, girders, and other parts with which to build a standard colony.
(Note that in the game, all this mining activity happens in the background — we'll just apply it to the local cost of materials, which will be cheap for anything you can get from the asteroid. This is the same sort of thing we do when you build around a planet or moon.)
Joe Strout
Lead Developer, High Frontier