What it does
When the ship is in vacuum and on a collision course with the ground, it will automatically show time-to-impact, and the estimated burn time to kill your velocity at ground level.
When the ship is in orbit and has an upcoming rendezvous with a target ship, it will automatically show time-to-closest-approach, and the estimated burn time to match velocity to the target.
When the ship is on a course to enter or exit atmosphere in the next few minutes, shows time unt
That was pretty much my own thought process, too. This has bugged me since I first started playing KSP. It seemed like such a simple thing to fix; I mean, heck, it's not rocket sci-- Oh. Well, okay, but it's not that complicated, thought I.
Anyway, once I started diving into the details, it was a bit more complicated than I had anticipated, mainly because the problem seems so simple that it's easy to miss the edge cases, of which there turn out to be lots.
Here are the edge cases I ran up