and it would require a lot more to sell it from the point of view of the moving ship.
The same distortion effect that is used during explosions in the graphics lib mod, could be used for the distortion effect, the only problem is that it's not a simple distortion from the center point, similarly the warp travel trail could also be a small distortion trail, much like hot air distorting the background. Only real concern is how much of a performance drain the fancy distortion effect would be compared to simple particle trails.
But, really, coming back to my prior point, "warp" and "sustained burn" are just fundamentally different, not one being a slight tweak of the other.
They can be as different as you make them to be. Really my original idea was that balance wise and gameplay wise they would be pretty much the same, with the only real difference being "the feeling" of using it would give.
Here is a picture of why I think they are relatively the same from a balance standpoint.
https://s28.postimg.org/os6bhvqx9/exxample.jpgMaybe I should just try to make a mod for this later on and not pester the dev.
Let's assume it was all perfectly balanced - which, as you note, is unlikely to be the case if there's a lot of it. Then an extra bit of customization is either an important decision or it's not. If it's not an important decision (and, ok, this is not a well-defined concept, but let's roll with it) then it's just adding noise, making it harder for the player to see what's actually important. This may be ok to some degree if it's also adding flavor or something else valuable.
If it *is* an important decision, well, how many of those do you want the player to make before they get to stop customizing and play the rest of the game?
Both of these issues are addressed by limiting the players exposure to the said choices. What I mean by this is that the same way you don't start the game with every single shipmod, weapon, ship available to you, the same way this customization would be only available or relevant later on.
Side note: It would be really nice for new players if the game let people see what a hull mod does, when either looking at character perks, or when looking at other ships in the store for example. For new players it would be handy if they didn't need to buy a ship before they can find out what a hull mod does, or if they need to level a character to find out what certain hullmods do.
Point is, even well-balanced customization options have downsides if there are too many of them. Basically, imagine if Starsector had ten times the number of hullmods, without UI improvements to help manage this information/decision overload.
As mentioned above, even 10 times the ship mods would be okay, as long as players aren't exposed to all of them at the same time at the start, but rather gradually introduced to them. For more advanced players, I imagine extra choices are very pleasant because they have assimilated all the available choices and extra choices are just that, more freedom, rather than overload of decisions.