Not sure if this is the correct thread for this, or if this should have it's own thread in the "Ideas" subforum, but I'd like to be able to interact with the crew, or maybe the bed, while flying in the empty void between worlds.
Space is vast, almost unimaginably so. In interplanetary space, in order for a collision, or even a close encounter, to happen, you would need to make a purposeful decision to do so. The chances of two spaceships colliding in interplanetary space is effectively zero; really the only places you'd have to worry about collisions are near populated locations of interest, like planets, moons, and stations. So, why does Steele sit their ass down in the cockpit for the entire ~10 hour duration of travel, when they really only need to be at the helm for the first and last hour of flight? And even if collisions are a worry, a shipboard VI could easily manage while Steele is away, and alert Steele when something of interest happens. For instance, Steele could step away from the controls to go to sleep, and while asleep, the VI wakes you up with a "Proximity Alert," and a pirate ship is moving in to engage. Or, the VI receives a Distress Call, and broadcasts it to your CODEX, and you can choose to ignore it and go back to boning Reaha, or have the ship full-stop and investigate.
Another thing I'd like, that kind of ties into the idea of interacting with the ship and crew mid-flight, is actually being able to walk around the interior of whatever ship you own, kind of like how you can with Kiro's ship. It would make several crew interactions make a lot more sense, as well as provide a skeleton to build further content on top of. For example, part of Bess's storyline involves her walking in on you watching TV. Except, when this event triggers, you weren't watching TV, you went to her and triggered the event yourself. Instead of this, what if one of the ways you could "pass time" while flying is going to the common room and watching TV, causing the event to trigger?
To kind of rough sketch it out, all ships in the game are going to, by nature, have a cockpit/flight deck, a kitchen/galley, a common room, "engineering," rooms for the crew, an elevator/staircase/exit ramp, and lastly, "machine rooms," where the stuff necessary for operating/maintaining various modules, gadgets, and weapons are stored. Crew could be in these rooms according to some sort of time-based schedule like bars, with someone like Azra spending most of her time in her quarters, and Yammi staying mostly in the kitchen.
Now, the ship internals would require a not-insignificant amount of rework being done on literally every crew member in the game, as well as trying to figure out how to match ship internal layout to external model, so that desire is more of a faint hope, unless Fen and co. have already decided to do so. But the crew interactions while travelling thing would be fairly easy to implement, in my opinion. Just use two status effects to denote when the ship is in flight, and how many minutes are left until it's time to come in to dock/land, and lock out the 'exit ship' and 'fly' buttons accordingly.