@Megalomaniak I also came across that method of mining asteroids- seems awesome but too much work for me show much mining happening as I continue development. At most I was planning on just showing the ship close to the asteroid in question and let the ship's mining drones drop of resources. I read somewhere that resource refinement needs ton of energy and water, so I'm going to build the game so that your ship when small just does these things inefficiently, but at later stages your ship might as well be a parked refinery.
@cybereality I didn't know about trojan earths, those seem amazing. For a game if I wanted to set it up multiplayer, I'm afraid that there's not enough individual roids around Earth orbit and that their distances would make things less fun (not gunna stretch too far from existing tech). A bigger problem- I think refining needs energy and water, and a trojan earth asteroid I'd assume wouldn't have any ice unless the asteroid had no spin.
For a circular grid inside a cylinder, the problem is either all the interior space isn't used or that factory components need to be of different sizes.
My first concept of a ship that can build itself up over time:
