Jump ahead to specific named time.

[Dunbaratu]

When all objects are on rails and none are in current "full physics" mode, presumably KSP could work out their position at any arbitrary time T without having to actually calculate all the intervening positions they occupied between now and then. If you have equations that you plug in time T and get out the locations of the objects (which as I understand it is how being on-rails works), then why not have a faster version of "time warp" that just skips ahead to the requested time and doesn't bother calculating the intervening moments?

To ensure it cannot be used when any object is currently loaded into the full physics engine, you could put the user interface for it only on the Tracking Center screen. I think you can't get to that screen without putting your current craft on rails first.

So the way it would work is this: After performing a burn you see that it claims you'll have a Duna encounter 180 days from now. You could time warp through those 180 days at 10000x speed, but instead you decide to escape out to the tracking center, bring up to time jump interface and type in, say, 178 days, 12 hours, to jump ahead to the point in time about 1.5 days prior to the intercept.

Alternatively, if the idea of typing a time is seen as a bad user interface, a slider along a timeline would work as well as a user interface.

If there's problems where trying to skip past changes of spheres of influence might make it not work and calculate everything wrongly, you could implement an upper limit on how far you can time jump - you can't time jump past the next predicted SOI change of a craft (i.e. encounter).

Obviously the impetus for this is the fact that even at max time warp, you can be waiting a very long time to slowly creep along your orbital path when going to/from the outer planets.