+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.
