Absolutely fascinating work you have here. I am in day 1 of doing the research to build a full simulation of a KSP cockpit, or at least the controls, and stumbled on this thread. Tell me, how much, if at all, did you consider a purely digital recreation? My first idea would be to simply project the KSP image from the navbal to a spherical screen of some sort. I actually found an interesting video of a device that looks like it could be recreated out of an arduino, some LED's and a stepper motor:
while not a tenth of the challenge you have undertaken, I hope you find it interesting. I will continue to monitor this thread as I work on my project as well. Good luck!
