Can I make a suggestion that all systems 'rock piles' be drastically reduced. They bear no real basis in fact unless we end up living in the Ort Cloud or the asteriod belt?
Darkness is only the absence of light, ignorance is only the absence of knowledge.
Our system does have plenty of rock clouds though, the Oort Cloud, the Kuiper belt, the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. I think Ceres would be prime for an asteroid base. Also keep in mind that asteroid fields in game are a sort of capital ship containment.
Freelancer systems have never featured realistic representations of orbital mechanics and only the occasional vague reference to stellar formation mechanics... basically no real physics at all, and certainly no semblance of scale. Given that the game was designed for atmosphere over realism, we have never seen a need to take a more realistic approach, particularly given the sheer amount of time it would take to redesign every single system in the mod.