instead of vulcanus default, give option to select which of the three to unlock first.
also, add a dummy planet near nauvis, which has asteroids of nauvis types, which you can just go to for collection, flying to and from nauvis that way or w.e.

Thanks — both ideas are good ones, and I've written them into the design document as future work.

Brick by brick I'll get my orbital mining locations. One planet down 4 to go;)

On a serious note trade hub would fulfill both ideas since you wouldn't need to give a planet from the start and you'd have a simple mining route. Trading in the hub could be unlocked later from research, reputation or a special quest to keep it's sense of progression.

Started on it. In 0.9.122 Nauvis got Rudus — a drift of rubble in its near orbit, open from the first minute. A short lane of 5000 km where the four basic chunks are collected: metallic, carbonic, oxide and stone. The density is the vanilla one, same as on the inner Nauvis lanes: the hub doesn't feed you any better than the settled routes, it just gives you somewhere to fly from the very start.

Vulcanus discovery has also been taken out of the starting set — the planet used to be a gift for one reason only, so that the ship had somewhere to fly. Now the first planet is the player's to choose and to pay for, and the first hour's route is the hub. Games already in progress are untouched; the hub is simply added to their routes.

There's no trading and no contracts at the hub yet — that's the next step. I like MikroPik's thought here: unlock trading at the hub not from the start but through research, reputation or a special quest, so the sense of progression doesn't get lost.

Done, it's in 0.9.126. Rudus trades and offers contracts: it sells what the ship needs — foundation, collectors, crushers, thrusters, cargo bays, defences — and buys ice, carbon, stone and plates. Three kinds of contracts: a delivery, basic asteroid chunks, and a watch at the node.

In the end I didn't gate trading behind research or reputation. On every planet, trading and contracts open as soon as you arrive, and changing that would mean changing it for all of them, not just for one node.