A quick search showed some mentions of this but most are from years ago or otherwise don't go into much detail / mention some slight subset of it in passing.
With the addition of ship production the player has access to a multitude of ships at any given time, allowing us to have an entire fleet for any given job. Right now, for instance, I have a good 40 ships probably and depending on if I'm going to the far reaches of the sector for loot, patrolling my space, invading other faction's planets, or taking on Pirate/Path battlestations I, ideally, want a different fleet for the job. Right now I'm only using two real "loadouts" which is either 4 Apogees, 2 Herons, and 4 supporting frigates for exploration or 2 Conquests, 2 Astrals, 4 Dooms, and 8 Frigates for taking on stations/large enemy fleets (plus auxiliary cargo/fuel/salvage ships on both fleets). Switching these out has sort of become a chore to do given I have to do it roughly every 2-300 in-game days at a minimum (when a pirate base or a luddic base appear again). Admittedly, with a T1 base, I could likely use a much smaller fleet but even then the time spent switching out, say, half the ships could still be more streamlined.
The best addition would simply be a "fleet presets" button ala autofit but for your entire fleet, where each ship would be the same as a weapon slot in normal autofit. Preferably this would also take supplies/crew/fuel from storage to fill a % you could set in the preset. Even better if you could have presets that automatically refit hulls to different loadouts if there is a ship hull available but it is using the wrong weapons (for instance I was thinking I'd want to re-equip my Astrals with Longbows and Herons with Wasps when I plan to fight larger Remnant fleets, maybe shuffle in some Solar Shielding on all my phase ships as well). Just to be clear, the idea behind this is that it would pull from planet storage and put ships not in the preset into storage automatically.
As for the display of the fleet itself, I'd suggest either two modes: one where you have a grid display and another where you have a list, like the one used by the construction order menu. Or, more simply, use the list at all times for consistency (and so you don't have to update two different UI modes). Preferably the list-style would also be collapsible for ship hulls/loadouts being the same so you see "2x Heron-class Fast Superiority Carrier" and "1x Heron-class Fast Strike Carrier" instead of three Herons with their names as separate entries.
I think we could also use an "Autofit all [Hull]", or perhaps be able to set the loadout of produced ships if we have the blueprints. That's just a smaller QoL thing which I'm fairly ok with, and which wouldn't really be an issue anymore if the fleet presets were added and would autofit available hulls as needed.
