The majority of the gameworld won’t have asteroids, but they’ll occasionally present obstacles that you can either go around or, if you have a small ship and know a route, slip between. They don’t sound like an important game element, but I find they add a sense of place that’s otherwise a bit lacking. Skulking around between them also reminds me an awful lot of spelunking (caving), which I rather enjoy.

Also, the picture shows roughly 50% of the screen populated by very large asteroids. Would it be possible to make the asteroids smaller and spaced apart more? Think about what would happen if I built a very large ship and had to attempt to navigate through the above picture. It would be nearly impossible. A possible solution would be to vary the asteroid spacing/size with the number of attached modules. Or (I like this suggestion more), you could have asteroid regions on the grid, where each region is spaced differently. Obviously, smaller ships could enter the smaller-spaced regions, while larger ships (and smaller ones) could enter the larger-spaced regions.

@DiceOooO & ryan: I could definitely damage ships in response to collisions, but I figure there’s already some risk to flying around at high speed and I don’t want to create any further disincentive. Also if this were velocity based then it still wouldn’t provide crushing damage, since relative velocities in that case are actually very low. I COULD just destroy modules on collision, but then I’d have to consider doing that for all collisions, and I’m worried about the impact that would have on combat (since your most powerful weapon would likely be some scrap that you bolt to the front of your ship and use to ram others).