How about the possibility of changing the orbits of celestial bodies? For example, to cause a collision, or as an alternative to terraforming?
You can do this in the system bodies window with SM mode turned on.
I meant the in-game ability to build an engine on an asteroid and launch it at neighbors in stealth mode. Or to build a grand ground-based project to move an entire planet.
That idea has been brought up a bunch of times, and the general answer is that the kind of engine technology used in Aurora wouldn’t be powerful enough to meaningfully accelerate any of the asteroids large enough to be included in Aurora.
Personally, I prefer a slightly more mundane explanation grounded in rational economics and common sense … 
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Whether such an operation makes sense is for the Emperor to decide. Unlike a nuclear warhead strike, it’s not clear who launched an attack with a large rock. Furthermore, the orbit of any object can be altered — it’s a matter of energy and time. In the game, there’s still no way to fully terraform celestial bodies. After all, even the gases used for terraforming are generated out of thin air, rather than produced from resources.
It will take you so long that your opponent will die of old age.
Gases are moving from the Aetheric dimension.
Roughly speaking, a terraformer is just a portal with a gas filter. It doesn’t sound like something that requires a lot of resources.
It’s really whether it fits within the games internally-consistent physics. It’s been suggested in the past and the maths don’t work. Even the tiniest asteroid in the game (1 km) is over a billion tons, even if it is low density.
Besides, the ships engines work to effectively within the game physics because they are (in the default lore) using the Aether. That wouldn’t be true for asteroids.
Aurora obviously takes a lot of liberties with real-life physical laws, but the game physics still have to be internally consistent to suspend disbelief.
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SM is “in game”.
Use it to RP whatever one wants, whether the mechanics allow it or not.
I do like the idea of having a game start tick option to make terraforming harder though. Certain gases cannot be created by terraforming installations or modules.
These gases will require “terraforming cargo” that can be picked up by freighters from certain asteroids and gas giants. The amounts would be huge, requiring specially designed freighters, tugs and cargo orbitals, or many trips with regular freighters.
IMO, first time you do terrafoming in this way can be fun; second time, it starts to bore you; third time… maybe there won’t be a third time.
Anyway, you will have to build very large shipyards (expensive, and a long time to wait for them to be ready), to assemble large freighters and tugs (a lot of minerals needed), that surely will be very slow (and will need to be protected by your warships, to avoid to lose them to the first Raiders passing), so the entire process would be very, very lenghty and expensive.
Maybe a harder terraforming (if it’s really needed, and only as a game choice activated by the player at the start of a new game) could be performed reducing the Terraforming Rate (or increasing its research points cost). But I like the process the way it is now, and can’t see the need to change it.
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Maybe just the two fictional gasses require TN minerals to produce, but stuff like hydrogen and oxygen can be made freely (RP it as being taken from the rocks or from space).
I think you are probably right. Aurora already has enough logistics gameplay. Adding logistics to terraforming would not meaningfully alter the game much. The transport of terraforming materials can be abstracted to the existing civillian shipping anyway.