Sasha wrote:A problem with allowing asteroids to become dynamic is a runaway problem of making more asteroids dynamic.
Like the kessler syndrome: What happens when I blow apart an asteroid and its pieces hit other asteroids? Those would become dynamic too and hit other asteroids and so on.
Cutting you off here - no they wouldn't. Only asteroids being actively mined become dynamic. If one chunk of asteroid hits a static asteroid, it'd be modelled as a collision between a dynamic and static body, like your ship hitting an asteroid as they're currently implemented.
Just make the chunks individually small enough when an asteroid breaks up so that it's not overly implausible that the larger asteroid doesn't budge.
Edit: Although if you
really did want this, I'd propose a minor alteration: instead of having mass-dependent drag in space (without the positing of H-asteroids, the implausibility of that pains me), why not say that the asteroid chunks crumble as they travel through space, so that the further they travel outwards the smaller they get? At some point, when they're too small to see, they get garbage collected. This should achieve the same effect as you describe.
Sasha wrote:Each time you blow a piece off an asteroid it moves away from the center of mass with a velocity of <chunk mass> / <total asteroid mass> * <some multiplier>
[...]
Say chunk one is 90% of the original mass and chunk two is 10%. The large chunk moves away slowly and the small one moves quicker.
I think your equation is wrong. I think you'd want ((<total asteroid mass> - <chunk mass>) / <total asteroid mass>) * <some multiplier> to achieve the effect you'd want. But again, I prefer crumbling stuff. [: