Okay, I've just uploaded a revised version of the demo to sourceforce. Here's the link.

Changes:
- Optional fixed camera angle mode - go to "options" on the main menu.
- 2-stick controls can be turned off (also in the options menu).
- A string buffer overflow error that caused crashing on Linux has been fixed.
- Various rebalancings. Tracking cannon is better. Torpedo takes longer to recharge.
- Two little lines indicate the direction and distance of your current selected target.

Also, I've removed the ability to accelerate backwards. I just don't think it was working; it encouraged a particularly cautious and not that interesting attack style (in me, anyway). In the full game it will probably be available as an upgrade or something. Sideways slide is still there.

Fixed camera is a nice experiment, but probably not worth keeping. It wastes a lot of screen space, I tried to uncomment the lines that adapt the ship position, and I even modified starfield to position accordingly, but it's still very confusing in middle of battle, too difficult to see our ship in battle.

I regret the suppression of ability to fly backward... When facing a warship, it's no longer possible to strafe in 4 directions in order to dodge, so if you're too close you have to turn away.

Here I attach a version where I have implemented a bomb weapon (replaces torpedo) It's a projectile that uses only the ship's momentum, has no collision while flying, and damages only at the end of its flight. You can press and hold fire to see a target reticle, and release to launch. It's rather accurate, just remember that the warships are in movement.
I tried to make an area-of-effect damage on explosion, but I failed (I don't understand the system of pixel collision) so I made it launch a small rings of 8 bombs instead. This is really an anti-warship weapon, because the precious projectiles won't be stopped by the fighters buzzing around.

I may try a "minefield" weapon, that leaves explosions behind to hit fighters that chase you.

I had a second win of mission 2, using aw missile and charged rockets, and I noticed it's now much harder to fight a convoy of warships that is going forward : Impossible to stay before them.
By the way, did you entirely remove the ability to decelerate? I had the impression there was only one speed of "slowing down" - when going into stationary enemy ships, I felt I had to anticipate much earlier to decelerate.

I would have requested it too, but after testing ... yuck An earlier version of AriesNL's game had similar feature, where there also was a delay to smooth out the direction changes. (the change was kinda "elastic") It was very impressive to turn at high speed (180° with mouse control) and see the stars zoom by, but it was only viable because there was a much reduced 'population' on screen - and player ship was quite distinct.

Yes it's what I uncommented. I had adapted starfield position accordingly, but it wasn't sufficient: starfield doesn't move as fast as the player's ship so the "plane shift" isn't very clear (at first I thought I had made it negative), and all ships have same color scheme, so the player gets really lost.

The code: There are things I still can't determine without heavy debugging, like the color numbers in these bitmap masks, the "units" for all these integer variables (some are in pixels, some are in 2^9 or 2^10 pixels).
Also I don't understand the behavior of damage values; they don't seem linear...

All part of the plan. The Angry Moth shouldn't really be taking on whole convoys by itself.

Yes. The down key doesn't do anything at all right now.

The colour numbers (if you mean the ones in the collision masks) indicate what a bullet at a certain point in or around a ship's sprite (with the relative positions of the ship and bullet translated to coordinates on the bitmap) has hit: shield, a particular warship part, or nothing.

The units should pretty much all be in 2^10 pixels for the actual location of objects in the game, translated to pixel values in the display functions. I'm not sure what's 2^9; that's probably just an obfuscated way of dividing something by two while converting it to a pixel value.

Damage values are just as they're written, so a torpedo really does do about 60x as much damage as a cannon shot. The point is to establish a clear distinction between light anti-fighter weapons and heavy anti-warship weapons.

Letting the player manage the whole fleet would be fun, but the game's ship AI and level scripting systems aren't really set up for that. Maybe next game. As for issuing orders to your fighters, most of the time it's not really necessary. I just leave them set to "cover me" all the time, changing to "defend" occasionally if I want them to go away for a while (so they don't get shot down while I do something risky).