[geoschmo]

Originally posted by LostCommander:

2: set the map generator to place one of these with every planet and possibly at LaGrange points as well.

This could be done. However once you have made this "not-asteroid" the game will use it for random placment of asteroids as well. You can specify it anywhere you want, but you can't prevent it from also being randomly placed. This may or may not me a problem though.

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?

Yes, but as SJ says it could also be uised to make space colonies out of regular asteroids too. Again this may or may not be a problem depending on your POV.

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.

If you don't have entries in the sectortypes.txt file coresponding to the new space colony planet size with anything but none atmosphere, then building an atmosphere converter on the planet will have no effect. It's the same reason you can't convert a gas giant to a none atmosphere. They don't exsist as far as the game is concerned.

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?

planet creator comp cannot be limited to the size of asteroids it can change, only by the size of planet it can create. So any size asteroid can be converted to whatever size planet that creator is capable of making.

Geoschmo