Well I finally did it, over the weekend I rolled out the new version. A big thanks to a colleague of mine (the Mad Dog) for pointing me in the right direction - I solved the duplicating external resource and onLoadInit not triggering issues by duplicating the bitmap contained within the loaded movie clip instead of the clip itself.
So finally I have updated my work in progress demo here which shows off the collision detection using a small asteroid field. Shooting the larger asteroids splits them up into smaller ones, hitting them with the player ship will damage the shield and eventually destroy the ship.
There is a fair bit of optimisation on this whole process still to come. For example, the player ship is using pixel perfect collision which can look a little odd when an asteroid passes inside the ship's shield boundary diagram. So maybe I will switch to radial collision in the next version for certain assets.
