Interesting mod and a fun challenge. If you don't mind babysitting your platform and save-scumming.

Problem 1: it's very difficult to automate slowing down sufficiently before the belt due to the buffers in pipes and thrusters, and that although circuits can detect when they are within the belt it's already too late to slow down. If the belt was wider but density ramped up/down gradually it would help.

Problem 2: by the time you detect a problem it's already too late. I guess it's just this way since Wube designed space age with much lower asteroid densities in mind, aside from the shattered planet which most people won't go to.

IMO the game doesn't give us the tools to properly deal with rapidly-changing asteroid density. Maybe using turret shooting speed as a proxy for asteroid density and then to control speed could work: I did this once before but it was terrible cludge I could never tune properly. It would still require slowing down before approaching the belt though.

I have to agree with leoch there.

What I did to cross the asteroid belt:
1. Heavily throttle the speed of the space platform based on whether or not it's currently traveling through the asteroid belt (obvious)
2. Add a mandatory stop whenever the space platform reaches the start of either side of the asteroid belt, so that I can fully flush the thruster fuel and restart the engines, ensuring that the spaceship doesn't start with the engines fully stocked, which whould make it reach ~150km/s and instantly get crush by the asteroids.

But AFAIK there is no way to automate the second action. I can't fully flush the thruster fuel out of the thrusters using pumps. Which means that I will always have to have this one manual input, which isn't a lot, but is in my opinion not in the spirit of Factorio.

At some point I might be able to have a ship so strong that it cruises through the asteroid belt, but in the meantime could it be possible to introduce mod settings to make the trip a little less hard?

Thanks for the great mod btw - I love the idea!

Hallo! I've been a bit occupied, but there is a new version up, which adds an asteroid density setting :)

My ships can cruise along at around 300 km/s for all the inner planets no sweat. Which has lead to the exact issue described here when going to through the belt itself being an absolute nightmare/chore. I ended up figuring out something that works. I made a combinator setup that checks if the current destination is either the inner belt or outer belt, and the previous destination was NOT the inner belt or outer belt then start throttling the thrusters to roughly 75 km/s (dumb velocity check and the screenshot is from before I started incrementing the speed looking for the limit of my current ship).
This slows the ship down decently by the time the belt is reached.
I have a second combinator that further throttles the thrusters to about 25 km/s (dumb velocity check) when we are between the inner and outer belt stops.
https://imgur.com/a/Xn1N9nb

So with my setup a trip such as Nauvis -> Gleba -> Inner belt -> Outer Belt -> Aquillo goes something like this for the speed:

Nauvis -> Gleba = Full-throttle.
Gleba -> Inner Belt = Slowed down.
Inner Belt -> Outer Belt = Snail's pace.
Outer Belt -> Aquillo = Full-throttle.

Works the same way in reverse. Aquillo -> Outer Belt is slowed down while inner -> Gleba is full-throttle.

I updated the mod and looked at the setting. The info says the range is from 0.0 to 100.0 and the default is 1.0. If I read that right you can go crazy crazy and increase the asteroids spawn by 100 over what they are now!? omg. No thanks. I think until I have the rail gun I'm a limit asteroids to 0.5 thank you very much. lol