I'm not a super modder but I have suggestions I think could be doable:
1- Captain's logs
What I mean here is to create a "book" of all events for a FTL adventure, creating sentences with the events on each jump. Such as:
Captain's log, November 18th 2014 - We jumped in a sector inhabited by Mantis fighters. We will have to be careful.
We jumped into a fight. We had to reroute Medical bay and Oxygen power to Engines . Lost 2 men in battle. The alien ship's hacking system drained our shields many times. After a few good shots from our Flak Canon MK2, they surrendered. They paid us 2 fuel cells and 29 scraps to stay alive.
How's that?
Then have the possibility to export the journal to a .txt file for later reading/printing. Or auto-send to Hollywood for the next Scifi TV series
2- The reactor's giving all she's got!
In this case, I think it would be nice to have a little 1% or so in general all-around bonus for one (or each?) spare energy bar. Using that last energy bar would then mean that all resources are used at 100%, then the 1% loss will mean brown-outs starting to occur, screens flickering, all kinds of annoyances when power is running low, or demand is higher than offer. By all-around 1% bonus I mean in weapons loading speed, engines escaping enemy shots, shields loading faster, cloaking/hacking/mind control lasting 1% longer and cooling down 1% faster too, teleporter cooling down 1% faster too, medbay healing 1% faster, clonebay cloning 1% faster, oxygen supplying 1% more/faster, FTL engines 1% faster, drones 1% faster/stronger... you get the idea. That little 1% extra margin might be THE turning point at a tough battle, who knows? Also, make it a 1% bonus in easy, 2% in normal, 3% in hard, so despite the game is on hard setting, that little extra bar will MEAN something in the end. But still keep it low enough to keep the advantage of buying upgrades, of course!
Or maybe an augmentation to have the ability to squeeze that extra last power from all systems, but have a random system lose 1 power bar after say 1 minute of overrunning due to overheating? Yes, similar to the battery bank, but sill....different.