I still think that landing and mining makes more sense than blasting bits off a planet and trying to scoop them up.

In the meantime I figured I'd try to add some bodies to Sol System... Ceres as a reference for the Main Belt and then a few random asteroids and stations in similar orbits.

I'm making a bit of progress in figuring out the structure but is there a reference somewhere I can check to make things quicker?

You mean a reference for the large asteroids in the solar system?

Wikipedia has all the data about specific Celestial Bodies I need. What I was hoping for was some kind of reference as to how to translate that data into code Pioneer can use. I'm looking at the Information for various moons and dwarf planets and trying to match it with the figures from Wikipedia in order to get an idea of what the numbers mean. I know there has to be a better way, I'm just fumbling along, really 🙂

Asteroid Belts, Trojan Clusters, Planetary Rings and the like really seem like they would be handled best in a procedural fashion in the long term. I just figure the closest (minable, Phobos and Diemos are inhabited) asteroids to Earth should be closer than Neptune...

Ah, this has come up several times before I think, this is the problem with forums being a repository for this stuff.

I always find the conversion non-trivial but there are some easy ways to do it.

There is the old Custom-Systems guide on the wiki which might help. Struggling to find the conversion examples I knew were around here previously though.

Also if you find a nice procedural system ingame, you can export it to lua for further customization.

In console:

StarSystem:ExportToLua ()

For orbit distances it is something like semi_major_axis (AU, division factor)

Mining in Frontier/Pioneer seems mostly to be done by large-scale operations, i.e. bases on asteroids and planets. Which makes sense, really. I always thought it a bit strange that one could earn money by just going around on planets scraping up a few tons here and there. I mean, unless you find something really valuable, there's not much money to be made (which is actually represented pretty nicely by the Game, I think. Metal Ore and precious metals don't exactly enable a great payday).

Prospecting, on the other hand, is another matter. Here you only have to bring home sample, and what you're effectively selling is the information on where you found them and how much more of it there is. This could be realised relatively simple by scripting... The problem is, the system generator doesn't assign any values of for valuable resources to planets. You'd have to do that yourself, which is of course also possible, but it might lead to a bit strange results at times, what with not really having access to the exact planetary properties...