I think I've settled on this as the final position for it:


It's more visible in first person, you can see it on your screen without shifting focus as far from the center during a dogfight, and it doesn't obstruct anything in 3rd person, being on top of the ESF. Of course, it'll be able to be dragged around and repositioned at will so it's not much of an issue, but as a default I think it works pretty well.

You'll be able to manually adjust the timer duration in the configuration options (to account for various ranks of FS, or to use it for anything else you wanted timed), cancel the timer by pressing the key again, and enable/disable it as a whole so you can turn it off when playing as infantry or something. It's currently bound to "X" by default.