Ok. I understand. I also think that we should change the field of view. I'm thinking that if I increase field of view by about 1.5 times (camera is orthographic) , it should improve the game experience - the player will have more room to maneuver, more free time to reaction, and also allow for a higher dynamic speed range. The main problem is that initially the game was planned to control an astronaut, for these reasons, spaceships were drawn large enough (so that it would not turn out that the astronaut is larger than the spacecraft). Another feature is how I have implemented the render workflow: gameplay resolution is 640x360 pixel, than I'm scaling all sprites (with point filter) in 3 times to 1080p full hd resolution, because this approach allows me to freely use sprite rotation without fear of losing the aesthetics of pixel art. Thus, to increase field of view, I need to either reduce the size of all sprites 1.5 times, or set the gameplay resolution to 540p, then it will look like this:
I hope this will be enough.
As for the sluggishness of the ships, this is somewhat more difficult, because I need more experiments to understand which linear and angular accelerations are optimal. For slow ships with turrets, I think that I need relize movement with 4 degrees of freedom (in other words, the ship should have engines around its perimeter and move in any direction without having to turn). For fast small ship I need adjust thrust and angular speed. There is some difficulty in adjusting the parameters. The fact is that most arcade games use the friction, so that the ships slow down very quickly, but in my case, honest Newtonian physics without friction is used, so that the spaceships have high inertia. I plan to increase the thrust of all spaceships, but I'm thinking about how to discreetly limit the appetites of players so that they don't accelerate to superluminal speeds :-) Either I have to do fly-by-wire for spaceships (like, Wing Commander, Elite and Star Citizen), or I somehow have to create obstacles for players so that they only accelerate to reasonable speeds. Perhaps the game needs some helpers for navigation. At least that's what I'm thinking right now.
Thank you for your feedback.