Feature request musings: On Lasers and Ladders

So.
Backstory first: Anyone who've seen my posting history knows I like lasers.
I've been fooling around a bit with Vesta Overkill, seeing how viable a laserboat built out of stock modules is. The answer is not very - when the enemy guns have almost as long, or longer, reach than your lasers your lasers take a whooping. 

On a whim, I tried a laserboat with stock components except for that the stock 13 MW lasers had got their range upgraded to 250 km. Still got whooped, but that was with me not maneuvering.
So I tried maneuvering. The AAR, in summary went:
Enemy launches missiles and drones (repeatedly).
The first enemy drone fleet intercepts me, and is knocked out by laser.
I note the enemy cap fleet is now on an intercept course, and burn towards Vesta to swing around into a new orbit.

Enemy adjusts to follow, enemy drone fleet intercepts me, is knocked out by laser.
I burn away from Vesta into a solar orbit. Enemy adjusts to follow, launches missiles.
I burn back towards Vesta going for a high speed pass into solar orbit, intending to burn and get back into orbit around Vesta.
Enemy missiles intercept, are lased, run themselves out of deltaV and are mission killed by me making a small burn to avoid them.
On navigation screen, enemy fleet is now at 0 second intercept range, no time for them or me to make course corrections. (Lucky!)

Enter combat, we're at a significant tangential velocity, they'll make a closest approach well out of their weapons range, which means they need to burn to kill that velocity. And with any decent amount of tangential velocity, you know they're going to be spinning round exposing their vulnerable tails.
I prioritize their engines, and keep an eye out on which of their ships expose themselves to me for some quick prioritization. The only ship I haven't got mobility kills on inside a couple of minutes is the Cutter, which runs itself out of deltaV by firing the resistojets nonstop.
Then I lase the weapons on the closest ship (and all the drones launched by the fleet carrier), manage to knock out the cutter that way, get a good way on knocking out the corvette. The enemy fleet makes their closest approach at around 100 km, then moves out of range.
Exit combat.

Cutter (disarmed) and Corvette (partially disarmed, disabled, possible crew kill?) destroyed. Siloship launches a few more missiles (ineffectually) as it and the Fleet Carrier (drones expended) head of into the wild black yonder (and exit the system and are destroyed).
Damage to my fleet: None. Expenditures: Couple of dozen to a few hundred meters per second of deltaV to turn to track.
I reenter orbit around Vesta, kill one of the remaining missile fleets by running it dry of deltaV then the other by matching orbit, entering combat and running it out of deltaV.

If they'd caught me dead on, or had managed to kill tangential velocity without exposing their nozzles at me, I'd've been dead (again).

The design used:


So - what's the point of this story?
Beyond proving that the arbitrary range limit on lasers currently exists only for reasons of gameplay to prevent complete laser dominance?

Point the first: Why ever turn off the Lasers?
As is, the only reason not to set the engagement range of any and all lasers in your fleet as high as the counter will go (and then ignore range anyway) is to let the AI have a chance to get anything through the intermediate range without expending all (or at least most) available deltaV in combat, and keep engagement times from being unduly drawn out affairs of the enemy ships slowly melting in the face of the unwavering gaze of the lasers (or expending excessive amounts of deltaV under same selfsame glare).
Implementing some kind of firing time limit on the lasers - equivalent to ammo for kinetics - would go a long way towards limiting this.
As is, there's no ingame reason (bar constraints on available power and not wanting to run the laser radiators to capacity at all times) not to lase at all times - some sort of limit to motivate lasing only when the lasing would actually be somewhat effective at causing damage would be appreciated.
Either limits due to coolant leakages (on the extreme end, switching to, or allowing the use of open cycle cooling?), or material stress due to temperature warping forcing mandatory cooldown cycles after extended firing, before being ready to fire again, or something?
I don't know, bears considering? 
Like with ammo for kinetics, it should be possible for the player to adjust designs to mitigate these limitations at the cost of taking on additional mass and making the system more expensive.

That said, when the enemy doesn't expose their most vulnerable gimballed thrusters to you, or run themselves out of deltaV, stock designs can weather the stock lasers during the approach from 250 km until weapons range just fine (ow). So it's not really a balance issue*, more like a 'please give me a reason why I'd ever want stop lasing except for maintenance, radiator damage or to power non NTR thrusters' issue?

* = Well, other than I expect that implementing such a limit would also affect user designed lasers that can comfortably vape stock designs while careening towards them at unsafe velocities, but what can you do?

Point the second: Tracking Ladders

Well, as I was in combat with the enemy fleet, I wondered about - what if I wanted to maneuver? (As is, with long range lasing ships, the only maneuver I did was to turn my ships when the enemy made their closest approach and started passing beyond my turrets ability to track, and the broadside logic barely nudged my fleet enough to start lasing again before they lost track of the enemy again.) 
Now, normally, head on approaches means it's fairly simple to track where you want to go, and what's a tangential course, and if in doubt you can always set to homing or broadside.
But the only indicator of the relative motion of your fleet and the enemy is the range screen, and that is... Not very helpful when there are many blips on it and they are moving at different rates and in different directions.

And I remember another game. Visual cue courtesy of Atomic Rockets: I-war.

It would be an interesting option to have, in the combat screen, as an option, an overlay to track the trajectory of maneuvering objects (or at least ships, if not missiles and drones) - ladders with the tracked objects position at set intervals in the past.
Not projected future trajectory - with maneuvering objects that's not really helpful and/or makes things too easy - just a plot of the past, maybe just the past several seconds, to help visualize and keep track of changes in velocity and heading and relative motion.
A little bit of a visual aid for those fancy navigators out there who want to try manual intercepts, or are trying to stay just out of the enemies preferred range, or want to track how their own ships are moving in combat/when zoomed in.