I too have tried to discuss fleet movements and how Sin's space warfare in more akin to trench warfare (sit in firing range and shoot anything that moves). But in terms of actually able to do in game, you can manually utilize movement continuously to have attack passes, it just requires total manual control.

A lil off topic, but my biggest peeve about ship movement in general (although it has improved with the latest patch) is the fact they move as if in water. For a colbalt facing north to turn and face south, it travels in a large loop to turn itself, in stead of just changing is orientation without changing relative position. As I said, with the current patch, Caps (especially) and other vessels will occasionally automatically re-orient itself to attack a ship to the side, but usually if the enemy is behind, the ship will still travel to turn.

Since when has TV or movies made sense? It would be one thing if they actually made passes, but if they are just going to sit there and shoot at the enemy as they do, they don't need to move forward and turn, they should just spin around. It also affects gameplay because sometimes I will tell my guys to attack someone but they will overshoot the target and have to move and turn around which leaves them vulnerable. to attack vs if they just turned around without moving forward. Same goes for enemy ships.

Correction, it is now fixed It will be in the next hotfix as it was driving me crazy too haha!

It's a game, not real-life.

That is a good point. In normal space, you would fire your engines to move you in one direction, then turn them off. Then, you would fire your thrusters to reorient your craft and open fire while moving in the opposite direction. While firing, you would increase your rate of speed in the opposite direction. Either that, or you should have some form of rear-facing turrets to fire while retreating. Rear-facing turrets would make more sense since you could continue to use your main engines to accelerate away from the enemy.

As for Star Trek-like battles, I would not expect larger ships to be able to do that. Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis both show ships moving how I would expect them to move. Large ships stay relatively motionless or move mostly in one direction or take time circling even larger, less mobile ships unless the larger ships have such vastly better technology that they are more mobile. The smaller craft like bombers and fighters have the greatest manueverability. But, even in Stargate, the ships do not sit still. They are constantly in motion, even the capital ships (unless it is a capital ship and its fighters against only small and more mobile craft). In general, if capital ships are facing other capital ships, they move.