Using flight direction to handle the maneuvers of your ships is a good thing to use rather than having them spin around. But could they be on the UI either toggled, or permanently visible? I think arranging them all in one row going clock-wise from back-left to back-right and then down would be best. There is enough free space in the UI atm to add more things, but as far as I'm concerned that would be all that would be needed.
Flight direction is a great tool, but it takes too many clicks to get to.
On second thought, I think using the same grid pattern would be equally suitable in a similar fashion.
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+1, having this control option during combat would be very helpful for multi-way mirror designs that can fly / shoot in multiple directions equally well.
Using the current method to assign a specific ship rotation mid-battle is a bit of a pain, and as soon as you give it another command it re-orients back to default anyway ... which likely puts the damaged / depleted sections back into the firing line again, defeating the point of rotating the ship.
With this new option available, it would take one-click to reassign directional facing, & without losing any queued-up attack commands etc in the process.
I would also love to be able to select multiple flight directions when creating ships, instead of being restricted to only 1 of the 8 options:
If the ship I design can fly equally well in 2 opposite directions, there is no real need for it to flip up to 180deg before moving every time.
Same applies to 4-way ships: if they can fly equally well in any of those 4 cardinal directions, they have no need to spin around up to 180deg just to have the arbitrary "front side" in front before accelerating. It should pick the closest of the pre-set flight directions to the direction of travel, so only has to spin up to 45deg each time.
Good feedback, will think about this.
Just want to note that flight direction has no effect on which side your ship chooses to shoot from in battle. You can adjust that by holding shift and rotating your ship.
Walt The shift-rotation only works for movement, not with attack commands [as far as I can tell]. When issuing attacks, shift adds it to the orders queue instead of replacing current order. All I can do is set the attack vector & engagement distance on enemy ship [which is great, btw!], but not my own ship rotation when doing so.
Or have I misunderstood something here?
Even using that shift-rotate movement method: the ships rotate to "front", fly to the location, & only then rotate to desired facing upon arrival. [Kinda covered this part already with the 2nd part of previous post ~ multiple flight directions].
Killcreek2 Holding shift brings up the little "widgets". Clicking-and-dragging one of those widgets allows you to rotate your ship. Works for both move and attack commands.
Why not make the ship move by wsad on the keyboard and force it to face the mouse? Alternative steering system
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Walt Aha! Found the little arrows around the edge when I zoomed in close to the attack marker, they were not obvious when zoomed out though. Thanks for clearing that up. 
Maybe you could resize them dynamically based on zoom level? [I assume you are overlaying those arrows separately from the attack marker graphic, rather than replacing the whole graphic every time.]
Vezerack Why not make the ship move by wsad on the keyboard and force it to face the mouse? Alternative steering system
Already on the roadmap: https://trello.com/c/3sTRiNfa/16-manual-control-mode-for-ships
Killcreek2 Maybe you could resize them dynamically based on zoom level?
Problem is then they get really huge relative to the ship and start overlapping each other and other things you might want to click on.
Walt I see your point. Then you would need to add a check for ship size, then check for overlaps with other ui elements, etc... Apologies, I didn't properly think that through, it quickly becomes a rabbit-hole of coding on second thought.
However, I do suggest increasing the size of them a bit, maybe double current size. Just so they are super obvious to a new player with a small ship, & would be easier to click on in general.
Walt
Since they go away when you release shift it doesn't matter what they obstruct. They NEED to be a fixed size on the UI regardless of zoom for usability. They already overlap each other when there are a lot of queued attack orders on parts of a ship that just broke up and it's not nearly as bad as the tiny handles at low zoom.
9 days later
maybe wasd for direction and q e for rotation