The first item I am working on is adding drones. I don't know how feasible or unfeasible this is, but I am going to give it a good try.

There will be 3 I am adding, two will be medium and one will be small. The two medium will be a cargo hauler, and an attack drone. The small one will be a very cheap short range attack drone. The reason for this is to try and keep balance with the larger rotorcraft as to give drones a very unique role, instead of being superior in every way to everything else. Drones will also be unlocked after microelectronics and advance rotorcraft.

I am also working on allowing people to color their rotorcraft. I have two thoughts on how to do this.

The first and easiest will be to add multiple versions of each craft. Allowing for a basic selection of colors. While this would be the easiest, I don't really like it all that much as it would potentially clog things down the line.

The second and harder way to do it is to add some sort of icon over the icon that gets colored. This would be much harder to make, but would allow people to choose any color they want and also not need a different sprite for every single color.

I was browsing this mod to give ideas and i saw this note.
I have experience as a graphic artist (but not for rimworld specifically).

What you are talking about in the second part is much easier, all you would need to do is remake the sprites with transparency for the colored parts. This is done by having a 0% alpha mask in the place where you want to have variable color, and everything else being opaque at 100% alpha mask at the colors that you want fixed (line borders/parts that do not change color like wheels or windshields). You can mess with intermediate masking of greys and blacks to add shading effects to colored areas, to give depth. The color is controlled by another layer added on the bottom that is controlled via programming to a RGB code.

Rimworld is capable of this, I do not know the specifics. Look at the code for pretty much all the items that take their color from their respective materials.

I suggest reaching out the people in the art section on the discord for guidance. https://discord.com/invite/rimworld

Thanks Pardner, this helped me a lot. I think I can push out a color update tonight, and possibly include a subtype with a full body paintjob, for all those who want to paint them camo or black.