Advanced propulsion and afterburners/plumes

[NorseEngineer]

There are many people talking about changes to thruster and adding fuel, but why not let the current generic thrusters remain, let them be fuel-less and good for the early game.
Then as you get more advanced in your designs you could build more advanced engines, which would then require fuel. Each engine type would then have some unique bonuses, a certain fuel consumption and energy use, and some extra requirements.

• Ion engines, a fuel effecient engine, though effeciency decreases with size, perhaps 20% stronger than thrusters, scaling down to 10%. Requires direct output into space though it does not need to more than 1 block as an output. The number of groups and their distance from each other and the mass center would increases the steering, or rather counteract it's decrease.
• Hyper drives, these would require that you are already at a minimum speed to use, uses a decent amount of energy and fuel, requires shielding=energy/s used, energyuse starts high, scales slowly, fuel-use scale faster. Creates an ellipsoid around the ship, smallest possible surface area, and everything within is accelerated and is taken to a subspace, GUI should change to something like a galaxy map, shield recharge is reduced to 20% and shields drain by 1-10% mass, when shields go below energy requirement hyper drive turns off and you drop out of subspace. Must be inside hull of a shielded ship(work on asteroids perhaps)
• Solar sails, a somewhat old technology reinvented they would use very little energy and fuel, but will only provide thrust away from the nearest star, 3 settings, "off" the sails will pack, rendering like an open door, "full" the sails are out and provides thrust based on distance to nearest star, and energy is used to counteract the braking effect that is present in the universe, and finally "half" where the sails themselves are packed, but the energy and fuel use are still there, to avoid braking, allowing you to sail through space with the speed you picked up near a star. This will require the sail to be very exposed, and surface is relevant for the thrust.

With weapons having slaves, then why shouldn't the propulsion system, this is where afterburners come in, and afterburners would be placed on the surface of the ship, these would light up with the same color as the engines, which could be determined same as for weapons, and they would affect 1 aspect of the propulsion, and different engines would want them placed differently, for IE it should be a tail behind the ship, directly connected to the engine outputs, for HD it should cover the surface of the ship, especially the corners that are closest to the subspace-bubble, while solarsails would have it as a wax-coating, evenly distributed all over.

• Afterburners, increases speed and fuel use, fuel scales faster than speed.

Yeah limited ideas for the slaves... Other ideas and thoughts are welcome, and I know hyperspace is talked about many places, I think it fits in here and even if it is not used the rest still stands.