Disclaimer:  I am the sort of person who has enjoyed pushing carboard chits with symbols and numerical codes on them.  I have played Mechwarrior 2 in wireframe mode for more efficient presentation.  I don't mind one bit the spartan imagery of Introversion's DEFCON, or the dated-ness of Illwinter's Dominions, and prefer either to pretty but inefficient or idiotic interfaces.  When playing a wargame, I prefer interfaces that provide good command/control, not interfaces that might inspire lavish paintings.  These views may be somewhat archaic.

It seems to me that certain things in Sins are either somewhat unclear, or very opaque, or accessible but cumbersome.

For instance, the firepower of a ship tends to be listed with something like "Average laser damage:  N".  There is no indication of the range of that particular weapons system, whether that damage is per shot, per salvo if there are multiple lasers, per second of continuous firing on a single target, in what directions it can shoot, or so forth.   This is worse when one is considering purchasing a ship for the first time; there does not appear to be a way to even get -that- little piece of information.

And 'range of X' for special abilities -- unit not specified.  Km?  Highlight a starbase that's finished; while you can see base range when you're placing it, there doesn't seem to be any indication of its range(s) of weapons after it's finished... or even how many weapons of what types it has and in what directions.  Range in a normal unit of distance might be interesting to know, if there were a way to measure such ranges or even merely a primitive scale ('present view is X km by Y km' somewhere, for instance).

To this end, and to minimize additional artwork requirements, it seems it'd be useful to have an in-game way to present either a screen or a large window showing basic information on ship class.  e.g.

(only really necessary image being some representation of the ship itself -- which already exists.  I don't really care about having a 3-D rotating ship periodically firing its weapons.)

Ship class:   Radiance

Faction:       Advent

Ship type:   Capital ship (Assault)

Cost:          <resources>, <time>

Dimensions: <blah>

Speed / turn rate:  <blah>

Armor:        original value (tech-modified value)

Shields:      original value (tech-modified value)

Antimatter:  original value (TMV)

Damage modifiers against:  (ship types, percentages)

Weapon systems:  (basic table, no pictures required, it's not like you're designing ships anyway or letting the user in any way control individual weapons systems so there's no real need to *draw* them)

Nifty Laser Cannon  -- quantity -- direction -- range -- area (point/cylinder/sphere) -- damage per attack -- length of attack -- cooldown

Nifty Laser Cannon -- etc --

Possible abilities:

ability (brief summary, AM cost, cooldown, research required if any)

Having this would probably nix a lot of questions and guesswork, seems reasonable for a commander who's considering which ships to invest in, and would only be using numbers that must already exist in-game.  Some might prefer a backstory of design, manufacture and service, but that's a bit fluffy compared to more important aspects IMHO.

When a ship or structure is actually existing and selected, it might be useful to be able to project three lines (forward, flanks) to the extent of its weapon ranges, and code the lines with lethality (based on expected damage per second; color / brightness / thickness are obvious variables) for the standard, non-AM-based weapon systems.