In a playthrough I attacked one of the outlaw asteroid mines in the later systems. The resultant shootout left a lot of free-floating ore, which were quite valuable indeed.
Nearby Ferian miners seem to ignore this; I was wondering if it would be better to make them opportunistic ore thieves - this fits in with the Ferian Colony missions where they send you halfway across the system to space random sovereigns for 'encroaching on their territory'. They would likely feel entitled to the ore being mined in the belts in their systems.
While I don't mine, I Could see this very quickly becoming the very-hated bane of mining-oriented players, much like salvager nomads are for combat loot oriented players >.>
(Not saying it shouldn't happen, just what the likely reaction would be. Mining is boring but OP at the moment, so I mean, it might not be unbalanced to add it, though I'd prefer to first add a more complex economy model with variable-rate regenerating inputs as opposed to hard-capped inputs. I'm totally ok with the player being able to just live in one system or a gorup of systems since I don't subscribe to the original vision of the game being a rogue-like; esp with the expansions its really evolved off in a different direction, trending towards becoming more like the EV games as time goes on.)