[LostCommander]

Very cool ideas guys. I am going to see if I can throw some more ideas/comments out there that might be useful:

I was primarily thinking space colonies NOT in asteroids, but I like the asteroids idea very much too. It just hadn't occurred to me.

Does anyone know if/how abilities.txt can/may be modified?

One possiblity for space colonies might be to ->
1: make a new asteroid size with a star field picture that is smaller than a tiny field
2: set the map generator to place one of these with every planet and possibly at LaGrange points as well. Nifty stuff about LaGrange points, thank you Arkcon for posting the NASA link.
3: make a new planet size for the space colony with space colony pictures. Here would be incoropated Urendi Maleldil's idea about making it have the same stats whether or not it is domed.
4: create the new component which could then specifically target the new not-asteroids to make them into space colonies. (1 fac, 100M pop max)
Is this possible? If not, why not?

A possibility for asteroid colonies ->
1: make 5 new planet types with asteroid pictures, corresponding to the 5 basic planet sizes. Here can be used geoschmo's idea about only putting map generator entries with rock/none or ice/none. If your race does not breathe none, then changing the atmosphere can represent the area being made more habitable / larger domed habitats.
2: make a new component that can turn specific asteroid colony sizes out of specific asteroid types. If these are randomly generated by the map generator, I do not see a problem. So what if there are some asteroid fields that already are suitable for colonizing?
3: blanace this by making a level one or two planetary weapons tech component that can destroy astroid colonies relatively cheaply.
Is this possible? If not, why not?

Thank you very much - LostCommander