Right, so I've been playing the beta for two days now and I'm really loving it. The only problem is that I suck at flying the ships. Half the time I careen about wildly missing my targets when firing until I actually hit them by accident with my ship. Or I get distracted and sit still for too long. Hopefully I'll get better as I get better acquainted with flying things about and be able to achieve some of the feats others here seem able of.
However, whilst pondering my deficiencies I was idly wondering whether a nice half-way point between full auto-pilot and full control might be possible. To wit, just as you can set your ship's weapons to automatically fire it would be rather helpful, for anyone like me whose not so great at the flying, to automate the movement and instead concentrate on shields and weaponry. The idea, vague as it is, was that it might be possible to set a target for the ship and then issue some fairly simple commands, for example "orbit target", "face head-on", "face right broadside". With perhaps secondary decisions regarding the optimum range for the ship to keep. That way you can fire the guns and keep a moderate amount of control over your ship whilst not needing to multi-task by engaging in high speed manoeuvrings whilst also trying to hit the enemy.
(As a small addendum, the idea for setting your ships movement profile is more or less completely copied from my memory of playing Nexus: The Jupiter Incident.)
