Would it be possible to prevent DSPs from appearing as conspicuous yellow "Asteroid #0"s for other races? It's a little hard to ignore, and I usually solve it by hackily creating a colony on the offending Asteroid 0# using the fleet orders menu and renaming it to "Gravitational Anomaly" or some such, but this is not ideal.

This is not really true. Analysis done by many folks here has shown that heavy armor is generally a less efficient use of BP than light armor/infantry and will end up suffering higher loss rates (in BP) than the lighter units. This doesn't make heavy armor useless at all, as it remains useful in tonnage-bottlenecked situations, but to say that the current model favors heavy armor is not correct.

Yes, your right. That conclusion was filtered through an assumed tonnage limit as almost always the main practical limit for my invasions in in how much invasion tonnage I can bring.

And I did not mean the specific unit type heavy armor, but all units with heavier armour than infantry (so including also stuff like powered INF armour).

While playing Aurora, making notes to not forget about what could be improved.
Few simple suggestions for UI:

1) Economics >> Industry
- add "Construction Rate" per factory indicator, along with "Construction Capacity"; currently only way to check it is to open Race Information, which is in different window

2) Economics >> Shipyards
- it seems, upgrading SY requires some minerals along with wealth, so it would be super handy to have this information in additional columns, for example

3) Economics >> Research
- add "Research Rate" per lab; currently only way to check it is to open Race Information

4) Economics >> GU Training
- add information about minerals cost for training Ground Forces, currently it is only "BP cost" column
- add "Ground Formation Construction Rate" indicator, currently it is in Race Information

5) Ground Forces >> Formation Templates
- for Show/Hide Obsolete models - make obsolete ones visually distinctive from current ones, by changing font colour (white=>gray, for example)

6) Events
- same as for show/hide obsolete models, make filtered events visually distinctive in some way (rarely needed, but I recently misclicked button in Events window and hide certain type of event for many years until I figured something is wrong, well:))

After playing around with Ground Combat it feels like something that I'm missing is that feeling that veteran units with alot of combat experience should perform significantly better than a freshly built formation.

The current ground combat model favors heavily armored units mainly to reduce casualties, but the IMO main purpose of reducing casualties should not be to save BP in less replacements needed, it should be to not lose the valuable experience your units gain from battles.

Multistage missile research costs are rather high for reduced-pace research games. It's quite punitive to have to pay the research cost of the base stages in addition to the research for the additional stages. I suggest that multistage missiles get a research discount cost - eg. for a size 8 missiles with size 6 of secondary stages, we only pay the research cost of a size 2 missile.

Multistage missiles are fun and it's a bit silly to discourage them.

Dev costs for player designed components have already been reduced in slower-research games in v2.6.

So If I chain 4 size 2 missiles together that should be cheaper than a size 8 missile to research?

I am trying to create a scenario where advanced ruins are found on Mars, however using SM we can only control how large a ruin is and have to keep cycling until we get a research site and even then, the site is random.

Can the Create Ruin selection screen be expanded to include the size, tech level, research site type, and research site bonus percentage and anything else related?

A lot of good stuff in here, but I want to respond only to the last thing:

11) Recycling of the orbital miner - the performance of the orbital miner leaves much to be desired. The module weighs 5000 tons and costs 120 corundum, and produces 10 tons of each mineral per year. Considering that comets and asteroids contain no more than three types of minerals (at least a brief review showed exactly that much), the payback period for the module alone is 4 years, not counting the rest of the ship and the availability of the vein. Add to this the threat of pirates, and the distraction of attention to setting up and monitoring production, and we get a less than favorable offer.

The orbital miner module, at its current size and cost, is the best source of mineral production in the game.
The cost is the same as a normal mine, and half the cost of an automated mine.
The module is 1/5 the size of the surface mines.
The module does not require workers, so you don't need to transport colonists and infrastructure (which you do for normal mines, and which are far larger and more expensive to build and to transport than the additional ship components needed for an orbital mining ship).
The base production is the same for all three (module, normal mine, automated mine).
Smaller bodies have much higher average mineral richness than larger bodies, which means that modules (which are restricted to the smallest bodies) are usually far more productive than normal mines on bodies with reasonable colony cost (which tend to be larger bodies).
(Also, it is not true that comets and asteroids can only have three types of minerals. In my current game, there is an asteroid with deposits of nine minerals. I assume it's possible (but very rare) to have deposits of all eleven types.)

These advantages are balanced by two mechanical disadvantages:
1) Can only be used on very small bodies, which have much smaller average deposits than larger bodies.
2) Very vulnerable to attack.

There is also, as you mention, the non-mechanical disadvantage: the player time required to deploy and monitor such ships.
Many players avoid using orbital miners altogether for this reason.

Some players (like myself) develop practices for using orbital miners that reduce the management time required.
For example, instead of spending time trying to determine the "best" place to send my next miner (which is time consuming), I follow a simple process:

First miner built goes to the closest eligible body. This is now the "live" orbital mining colony.
After that, I follow two simple doctrines:

Doctrine A--Distributing new miners
At the live colony, is it more than 20 years until depletion of all deposits of the crucial minerals?  (You decide which minerals are crucial; for me it is usually DUR,MER,CRN,GAL.)
Yes) Send this miner to the live colony.
No) Send this miner to the closest eligible body that is not being mined. This is now the live colony.

Doctrine B--Redistributing miners
Every five years, look at each orbital mining colony, starting in the home system and then going through other systems from closest to furthest from home system.
Is there more than one miner here?
Is the time to depletion (of all deposits) less than 10 years?
If yes to both, move half of the miners (rounded down) elsewhere.
Where to move them to depends on where the current live colony is.
If moving to the live colony requires backtracking towards the home system, I prefer instead to make a new colony at the closest eligible body in this system (or further down this jump point path, away from the home system).
That colony becomes a secondary live colony for redistributing other miners in this jump point branch.


Anyway, my main point is that the orbital mining module does not need to be improved. It is well balanced as it is.