{Mod Feasibility Question] How hard would it be for a mod to implement simpler, faster craft shadows?

[cosekantphi]

I play KSP on a low-mid-range non-gaming laptop; it has integrated graphics. Nevertheless, I'm able to play an RSS install with 8k planetary textures, RSS Visual Enhancements, and a large suite of part mods at above 30fps in 900p. Provided of course that I set my render quality to fastest and disable vsync and anti-aliasing.

Problematically, you don't get any craft shadows at all unless you set the render quality to at least simple, and setting the quality to above fast sends me to about 15 to 20fps  in atmosphere with a ~50 part craft.  But as far as I can tell, simple and fastest look essentially the same apart from the craft shadows, which leads me to assume the big performance penalty comes from rendering the shadow's shape as a function of the craft's shape and attitude.

I'm not a programmer, so I'm here to ask: Is this correct? Because if it is, it seems as though making the shadow a much less detailed shape  would save a lot of fps. What if instead of generating the shadow shape  on the fly, a mod simply generated elliptic shadows based on solely the craft's size and aspect ratio in whatever initial attitude  it is in the VAB/SPH?  Most landers are essentially circular anyway, so not much is lost in those cases.

I'm very curious if this is a plausible workaround to the performance intensive stock shadows because craft shadows are not just an aesthetics concern. Without shadows, it is very hard to accurately gauge your altitude while landing, so it's very unfortunate they aren't very usable on lower end systems.

Edited March 12, 2023 by cosekantphi