Speaking of gas giants, is it just me or are the gas giants in most systems a bit too small? Perhaps I'm just expecting them to be bigger because Jupiter is my go-to for visualising a gas giant?
Absolutely!
Imagine if the moons were realistically sized relative to their parent gas giant - you'd have tiny little circles zipping around. They'd be hard to see, hard to click on, and hard to present information about what fleets/stations are orbiting them. So you need to re-build the UI system to take into account density of information/zoom level and re-present info so you don't get a cramped little blob of fleet icons rapidly orbiting. Then either change the timescale conceit of the game, or revise the UI further so that having a human-perceptible orbital period for the gas giant doesn't turn the moons into flies circling around at hyper-speed...
It's like how the spaceship fights are between big colorful sprites that fall within a certain size range that can be displayed easily on most (reasonable) monitors: this is a game about driving the pew-pew ship around and watching the lasers and booms. Similarly with the star system maps: you get the drive your fleet around with arcade-like controls and everything important is visible within a scale that doesn't require radically changing the camera scale, or taking an hour to fly between planets.
Some games take on these sorts of problems in a way that chooses to try to avoid the arcade-like abstraction, eg.
Terra Invicta. And I'm watching their progress in tackling these design questions with popcorn in hand, cheering them as they go! These are design problems I like to fiddle with in my non-Starsector time.
The question is, (and it is an interesting one) where do you draw the line between ease/comprehension and verisimilitude, given the player experience goals of Starsector?
(And more annoying second question is: how do you allocate finite developer time to this vs. other needs? And no, outsourcing everything to volunteer modders, or even paid additional teammembers, does not give results without serious overhead cost if the same focus of quality and, ah, vision is expected ... )