Next we'll have to get them into belts and rings around planets 😉

Beautiful... oodles of 'roids! I love flying through massive 'roid swarms on torus!

yes please need to find a way to get them into game, options are to make them static around certain planet types or have them randomly appear in random locations in space.  Id like to see them as a combination of landmarks ( ie broken planets) or very large bodies mini moons and some random encounters to

Planetary rings of gas giants?

Yeah, that would be great, we'd need an another objecttype to render, using 500 ship objects for this might be overkill.

try 1000 for real overkill

Are these static rocks or will they move/collide on there own? Or is that way beyond the scope of the engine or peoples graphic hardware?

But all those rocks look great and will add a nice effect, especially if there is little overhead for the graphics to have plenty of them then I guess its ok to go a little crazy. I haven't played Pioneer in a while (i know bad me) but that radar seems a little too cluttered for me, maybe only having rocks of a certain mass show up or be able to filter it out. Just thinking about tracking ships on the radar with all those assets on it.

This was just a hack - 500 ships with an asteroid-looking model.

If (IF) we ever did something like this we'd have to do some specific code for it. Probably a bunch of very basic, light objects that are affected by gravity and be collided with, but with very simple meshes, and of course none of the trappings of ships (fuel, scanner, etc). I expect it could be made to perform pretty well even on low-end systems.

I actually think the scanner looks good. If there's lots of asteroids around then maybe you want it to screw with your sensors, so the people can hide in there 🙂

IF it was ever done it would add to the real world science fact asteroids occour in space but then again are very far apart so they could be a bit more random and spread out . 

Yes you would probably just see one at a time, however in the rings of the gas giants they would probably be more dense and small.

But the it would be nice to have an object as robn describes, that could be used for just about anything from asteroids to debri, satelites etc.