Thanks for the reply.
For point 2 and 3: as you said, the game is based on turns which composite of a movement phase and an engage phase. and these two phases cannot be split (e.g. let some other phases to be executed simultaneously or between them) easily, nor can a ship has more than one engage phase in one turn. I once thought that the game might contain some data structure like Queue<Phase> and each ship enqueues its own phases into the queue, then the game later executes these phases by dequeuing them one by one. Now it seems like it's more closer to a Queue<ShipTurn> and each ShipTurn has two members (or states in a state machine, well whatever it is): Movement phase and Engage phase.
Hmm... as a game developer as well, I understand the great difficulty of changing fundamental part of game design when the game already has high completeness level.
So perhaps I could expect them in the next game you will release someday?
For point 4: good point, unless we can setup multiple sets of elevations which is not possible in the current system, or perhaps we can just add an extra constant or proportional angle (like +10 degrees or +30% of elevation angle, clamping it up to turret's max elevation is needed of course
) only for the turret that is going to launch star shell, for other turrets they just use the elevation given by UI. Talking about this, another question just reaches me: is it reasonable for a ship to use a range of elevations for different turrets/barrels (e.g. 12 degs for turret A, 14 degs for turret B, 16 degs for turret C, etc) when trying to find out the correct elevation for its target? I don't know if any ship did like that in real.