Meh.
Fine effort, but it's still a stats-fest. Maneuver or no. Fleet with best stats wins.
Essentially, you have two ships closing on each other blasting away as quickly, and often as practical. Two men in a bull ring with machine guns running at each other trying to see who dies first. Every now and then, one of them might do a Jame T. Kirk body roll. (
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/quotes?item=qt0424445)
There's no reason to maneuver other than to close or run away. Facing only affects the spinal, but there's no motivation to not just fly headlong in to each other. If the facing ends up making the spinal impractical, folks will simply design them out of ships to get more turrets/bays, and save costs (which nets more turrets and bays on the field). All the spinal really does it keep a ship from changing speeds. But this isn't really a disadvantage, since ships will likely be coasting more than not, and when they do need to accelerate, it's more than likely they're doing it to "run away" and the spinal would be out of arc anyway. So, no blasting opponents in a running retreat with the spinal.
Since there is really no facing, maneuver benefits/punishes both attacker/defender. A fast opponent can fly up on a slow opponent, but both benefit from the close range. In fact, if the fast attacker doesn't have initiative, he's punished by getting to shoot second, despite being the one that controls the engagement range.
Your phase chart is no different, conceptually, than the SFB impulse chart. It's just backwards. In SFB you have 32 firing opportunities, and N movement opportunities based on your speed. You have N firing opportunities based range.
The way I read this is that in a normal round, a ship will move. And in the extreme case of two ships closing to range zero, they then get to proceed to pump 30 shots into each other. So, basically range 0 has 30 times the chance to hit than range 15. But I assume the to-hit number is the same regardless of range, since the phasing makes long range "harder to hit" due to less shots involved. Otherwise, range gets doubly punished.
The only real benefit of this mechanic is that larger ships will be more destructive to smaller ships as they can change their fire throughout 15 phases of the firing sequence. So, a ship with 100 turrets, having to roll, say, 50% chance to hit (I have no idea what your hit numbers are, but I assume they're not based on range, since the phase mechanic handles that), at range 8, can inflict 400 hits on a single ship down to 50 hits on 8 individual ships (assuming all at the same range). So you can easily see this eating up small ships (like fighters, or missiles -- missiles are toast in this system). In contrast to a normal combat round where the ship would have to allocate all of their fire once, and make 12 attempts per target, resulting in 6 hits per target. But they likely wouldn't do that. Better to destroy them one at a time than damage them equally. Anyway, the phase system gives the firing player finer resolution over the placement of their shots in contrast to the single round combat. They get to shoot and evaluate many more times than the 1 move, 1 shoot idiom.
In the end, depending on how you manage the hit numbers, the only real difference between this and normal mayday/high guard is potentially lethality, simply because of higher fire rates.
But if the hit numbers are adjusted to basically be "the same" as "one round of high guard", then the only real difference is the resolution and placement of the fire over numbers of targets. One on one, ship to ship, there wouldn't be any difference at all. Just more dice rolling to lesser effect.
Anyway, TL;DR - yea, you can maneuver, but it doesn't really matter in the end. Phase system is basically a complicated range mechanic (with a slight benefit of higher fire resolution).
FYI you can eliminate the whitespace in those posts by eliminating the line breaks in your HTML table. Just make your table one long line.
