That YouTube link for navigation control is pretty neat! And it looks like all that has been achieved with holding down a mouse button. The animation does require some AI working out the direction it is going relative to its orientation. Really interesting stuff.
Our team also struggled a bit when trying to scale pixel art in our project and our approach was to adjust the Windows size… (the lazy way) however I would say, if you then created sprites of few sizes for the same spaceship, you would be able to do camera zooming and just change the sprites as you do so. That effect would be pretty cool to have I’d say. (Perhaps camera zoom can be triggered with a button by the player rather than automatically so that things are more flexible according to what the player is currently trying to do) and your screenshots do show that it can significantly affect the look of the game and the sense of surrounding.
I would love to see how you continue to develop on it and how your decisions will effect the final product.