As mentioned in the comments section, I have a suggestion for the future rework. As the in-development version is to have the orbiting ship as a mechanic, what would you say to allowing the ship to perform *orbital bombardment* if sufficiently equipped? Would have to be balanced in some way, but I would leave that to you.

As a possible balancing mechanic for orbital operations, perhaps orbital travel could be abstracted as a fuel cost balanced against a time cost. RimWorld ships use torch drives, and would thus be capable of absolutely ridiculous levels of acceleration, so the player could be presented with a choice to either wait for the ship to have orbited into position(spending time), order the ship to perform a constant-thrust maneuver for immediate positioning(spending fuel), or perform conventional positioning burns(balanced time and fuel costs). Potentially, fuel costs could be calculated for an arbitrary(player-selected) delay. This would, hopefully, present interesting choices to the player, not only for time and fuel but also the opportunity cost that spending or not spending either would present. Finally, this could also be implemented as rendevous windows for Shuttlecraft, whether the player can wait to laucnh-to-rendevous or not.

In any case, I hope you found my suggestions interesting, even if they're not suitable or feasible to implement.