In my mid / late game playthroughs I struggle having a lot of lonely ships working and collapsing my list of ships. It can be sorted by naming the ships with codes to reorder the list but still it's a bit ugly. So my suggestion is to be able to set a mining operation fleet in which a lot of miners could be agrouped. Perhaps the creation of an XL ship with huge storage that acts as a carrier in which the other ships diposites the ore / gas they are mining through the sector and then some traders associated to the XL carrier try to sell the ore / gas (they would need solid / liquid storage though). In that way we could assign defenders to the fleet too; it would be an awesome view, see the huge carrier surrounded by defenders, miners and traders working for him (like a mobile station). To make this cooler it could be set an 'event' of pirates attacking that big fleet sometimes, so you could jump to a defender and fight the pirates or Xenon (or perhaps another corporation, I'm rambling here) in a big space battle trying to destroy your operation.
It would add some diversification to the game, which in my opinion is what is affecting the replayability nowadays. I mean, the game would be cooler (it's already so cool, but you know, always can be better) if you had more starting playstyles that pay out similar. For example, I want to be a trader, I focus on trading and improving my trade empire (Trade fleets maybe, just another idea I have). But if I want to focus on mining and be a mining corporation, my idea could make that playstyle differ from the trading playstyle. Nowadays it's almost the same, mine some crystals or do some missions, set up some autominers, set up some autotraders, then go into empire building, and the fact that is always quite the same it's what puts me out of starting new playtrhoughs and replaying the game (I did it several times, almost in every beta / new patch, and it's starting to be boring).
I know there is a mod that make something similar, but I'm more a vanilla player (although I'm gona test some mods in the future because modders are awesome and sometimes they revamp entire games (Rimworld player here
))Or perhaps, if you don't like that big changes or ideas, just adding some option to agroup ships in lists would be fine too, so we can 'hide' all the miners and autotraders to check them only when we want to (actual fleets are not an option because you have to make one fleet for autotrader / autominer and then you collapse the fleets list)
