More Deployable Parts in the Ship Designer & Custom Shield Sections

[Tipper]

I absolutely love being able to animate doors and landing legs. The ability to do the landing gear animation is wonderful, and I think it should be implemented into other actions a ship can take. All of these suggestions will function the same as landing gear, where you designate a mesh as a part with states, then you can add states to represent different levels of deployment (from Open to Closed with the 8 other steps included, also including states for broken or stuck)

• Weapon Deployment - They activate when you have an active attack/patrol order or otherwise have your weapon systems ready to fire.
  
• Fire Animations - Would need to be have both the weapon deployment and the fire animation. Examples include large barrel guns having recoil, laser lens focusing, or missile launch bays opening.
  
• Shield Deployment - When your shields are up, this part appears. A big shield projector bulb rising out of the top of a ship.
  
• FTL Drive Deployment - When your you're traveling to via wormholes or have a deadhead order active, your FTL drive deploys. This would be useful if your ship wanted to appear to have deployable warp nacelles like in Star Trek (see gif below)
  

• FTL Drive Animations - When your FTL Drive is charging and activating, allow some animations to show it. For example would be the engine room having animations where the reactor is shoved into overdrive, or the warp rings on a ship spinning up (see below)
  

• Looping Ship Idle Animations - when the parts on your ship move its just cool, I'd love to have outer  sections of the ship animate when your ship is simply powered on - for example, the rings around a reactor core or the movement of pistons
  

Also, this is only tangentially related to these suggestions, but these ideas also gave me the idea of allowing the ship designer designate faces/meshes of the ship as shield sections. This would allow the designer to make nicer looking shields, a big upgrade from the typical streched shield bubble that every ship has.  Though to keep it newbie designer friendly, an option to use the default shield bubble should be added. To avoid exploits where you're able to hide your shield, you'd probably want to include a check that all the shield faces don't cross through any other parts other than shield sections.

Let me know what you think.