Flight UI cleanup

[Lorion]

There are currently clearly much bigger and more important problems than those related to the UI (mainly performance & physics) but I still want to take the opportunity to share here my current issues with the flight UI. This is no stylistic overhaul suggestion (since I have my doubts that the developers will consider significant art style changes in the near future) but rather smaller things which are relatively easy to fix.

• A lot of the UI elements are not properly aligned: most elements have a margin to the screen edge (and it is also inconsistent) while some elements are put right at the border of the screen. Either stick everything to the screen edge or give every element a consistent marign.  Also especially in the lower right corner there are a lot of unaligned elements which is quite unpleasant to the eye. See the following screenshot with added guidelines and colored margins:
  Spoiler

  

• Addionally, the stage button is bit big in my opinion. Why not take some space of it to integrate that arrow button?
• The time warp and game view panels in the lower center are too cramped considering they are shown in two distinct panels. Add a small margin in between.
• The deltaV readout for the individual stages is too  close to the stage number. Seperate them better by adding the unit and amybe also a small divider.
• As often criticized, the new navigational instruments take up a lot of screen space. Especially the new SAS controls panel is just unnecessarily large. If the devs don't want to take the KSP1 route with semi transparent buttons, I suggest a smaller bar with the most important buttons (lock, prograde, retrograde, maybe also maneuver node) while all the other rather rarely used buttons are hidden in a drawer only shown when the mouse hovers over the panel. (But of course it should also be able to be pinned and kept open). In addition to the most prominent buttons mentioned the main bar should also show the last used button from the extended list. With that, the current SAS direction is always visible and it's easy to quickly toggle between the main directions and one additional dynamic direction.
• The navball is also quite massive. Two things I suggest here: Remove the heading tape. It's unnecessary because you already get that information by the navball itself. (It is basically a 2D tape.) Use that new free space for other stuff which allows my second suggestion: Push the orbital info panel a bit into the navball panel to save even more space.
• Also it would be cool if users are allowed to reposition all elements freely to their liking.

The following screen shows how I imagine the screen to look like if all these things are integrated

Edited February 25, 2023 by Lorion