Star Control was an old DOS game, but it absolutely nailed the arena combat physics resulting in some very fun battles. It even had planets with gravitational pull. If there's any way you can find a playable version of it on emulator that could give you some really good ideas as to what the movement should feel like.
As for visualizing the ships orientation . . . yeah that would be harder to do as the ship gets blown to bits. Maybe have a permanent "outline" of what the ship looked like to start with so that no matter how much damage it sustains, the player can always tell which way is "up".