From a lore standpoint, most of the technologies that are part of my mod are not very advanced. Someone in the sector should be able to read on the internet how to build orbital mirrors or atmosphere processors - the same is not true for the planetary shield.
I have to say that I dont agree with this take on the lore. Firstly if terraforming tech was easy to replicate and produce, with or without existing examples, the larger factions would still be doing it, and they aren't - no one has since Mbaye-Gogol bit it in the second AI war, since that was their corporate monopoly and no one else could do more than
really rudimentary changes - even Mbaye-Gogol were only able to make relatively small changes according to planet to planet lore bases (ie: Qaras, Yma). Secondly, there is a drastic difference in the engineering specifications to be able to build one solar shade/mirror/atmospheric processor, and to be able to build a network of them functionally enough to accomplish terraforming appropriately, and it is much more complicated than simply adding more. I understand that for simplicity's sake the game shows one mirror/shade or three mirrors/shades, but in reality there would have to hundreds of thousands, they would have to be regularly maintained against micrometeorite strikes and radiation to not deprecate over time (see also: Asharu in Corvus), and they would have to be placed in exactly the right places in relation both to the planet and each other to accomplish their goals, and the same goes for processors.
All of that trivia minutia and stupidly opinionated bias over realness emulation vs functionality in a sim aside, the actual changes aren't necessary or important. It is of course your mod, and I have been using it because I like it and will probably continue to do so, so don't read too much into my pedantics on real world terraforming theory with hints of insinuative but obscure in game lore references.
I'm definitely not going to implement terraforming-related artifacts or special items after seeing the negative feedback DIYP got for doing that (due to the issues I mentioned above).
Ideally the player should be able to control terraforming remotely in addition to viewing progress. Unfortunately I'm not sure from a technical standpoint how to make that work correctly - I think I would have to overwrite the market-related classes from vanilla, which I can't do since it would create compatibility issues. I could make it possible to view terraforming progress on the industry tooltips for terraforming buildings, but that would be awkward without also providing the ability to control it remotely.
This is all fair, I knew you would know more than I would which is why I really only wanted to throw the ideas out there in case both you liked them and they were feasible, else I'm happy to keep using it as it is. The only idea I have that
might work differently from overwriting market classes would be to find out how IndEvo did their interface for the courier ports, and/or combine that with Nex's remote fleet request concepts by asking/working with their respective authors if they were ok with that. But I have no idea how those work at a code level, so for all I know this is meaningless and incorrect gibberish and if so that's fine, no biggy. Thanks for all of the consideration, truly