I already posted this in the discord, but I feel its a pretty well thought out feature, so I will post it here as well.
'Overlay mode'
On top of 'Build', 'Paint', and 'Crew', have a menu for 'Overlay'
This would display different overlays that would be helpful for optimisation, such as:
- Centre of mass (for thruster placement)
- Congestion (highlights squares where crew are walking slowly - calculated by a running average of crew speed in each tile, over 10 seconds)
- Activity (Changes colour of crew quarters depending on how many inactive crew)
- Arc of fire (Shows the true arc of fire and the potential arc of fire)
- Ion beam paths (With crystals turning red-green on how efficient the combination is, and different colours for different strengths of beam - The competitive graphics mod does this, but I think it would be helpful in vanilla.)
I have made some pictures to show how these would work. I cant figure out how to post them here, so they are in #ideas_and_suggestions