Here’s one more update. Unfortunately the semitransparent panels caused a rather unpleasant flickering effect for the starfield background, so I switched to fully transparent windows. (@GameGod, sorry about the radical modifications, but I found the fully enclosed cockpit a bit too claustrophobic.)
Out of curiosity, is there an extension that supports a settings screen with persistent storage? It would be nice to give the user a choice of cockpits, control scheme, and difficulty settings, but it’s a bit clunky to implement that from scratch.