I got a packed schedule today, so I’ll try to keep this short.
Last week I spent an above-average amount of time on communication. Just in case you missed it: I posted a development update covering the year so far as well as a Call for Ideas regarding the 25th anniversary of AirlineSim in 2027. You can participate in that discussion right here on the forums.
On Tuesday, I made a few adjustments to our data pipeline as well as the game itself to support “conversion-only aircraft types”, meaning types that aren’t and never were available fresh from the factory but can only be “produced” by converting another type. The changes are live in Paine and @Priller is experimenting with the first such types.
The majority of the week was about the new UI again, of course. While I have decided to keep visual adjustment to a minimum a while back, there is no way around some adjustments when switching frameworks. In particular, some of the earliest steps into the direction of the gen-3 UI introduced a new UI library that brought its own styles. Since I only used it for very small and self-contained components so far (the game world info dialog and release notes dialog, for example), using said library’s standard light and dark scheme was acceptable with minimal adjustments. That’s why these bits currently look a bit different than the rest of the game. But for an important and complex component like the header, that isn’t an option.
At the same time, I don’t want to tie those new components too closely to the way things are currently done. The opposite is the goal: Modernise the frontend and get rid of old, outdated stuff. So in a classic case of chicken and egg, I worked on defining a technical structure that would allow me to style the components I work on now in a way that will be easily adjustable once an updated color scheme comes around.
To that end, I experimented with such color schemes to get a feel for what will be needed in the resulting design system. As one does these days, I relied on AI assistance for that. And it was really surprising to see that the results looked somewhat similar - in spirit - to a design AirlineSim had many years ago, implemented by our then-team member JWK 
I am not posting any images of what the AI spit out (because I am almost certainly not going to use that material in its current state). But just for a “trip down memory lane”, a quick screenshot of what the game looked like back in 2009:
