The Rhustarim Hegemony wrote:EDIT: Reliquary makes another good suggestion, and probably the most solid reason as to why you'd settle on a planet, but then you run into the issue of "Why don't you just mine asteroids for your minerals?"
It could be a matter of relative abundance. If you're looking for metals like iron or nickel it's definitely more feasible to mine asteroids than traipse down a gravity well, but if you're looking for heavier elements like uranium it may be more economical to mine on the surface of a planet or moon, since there might not be enough uranium in the asteroid belt to justify mining in and of itself. I'm no geologist, though, so I may be entirely wrong about that.