RPG

I've been thinking about this a lot. And not just for space combat. Naval combat, too. I don't have a good answer. I think a single-person fighter dogfights could be done almost the same as person to person tactical ranged combat. Maybe not naval here - tactical Optimist or canoe battle. ;-P Larger ships, though, are either going to be very abstract, if you're the captain giving orders, or over-zoomed in if one following orders. A partial way around it is to treat the ships as the characters for the fight. Easy for solo. Takes agency away from everyone but the captain in a group. Which is probably realistic, but hardly fun. Even so, you can have the gunner rolling for shots fired, navigator rolling dodge, etc.

I've been avoiding (solo) games with ship-to-ship combat, as much as I really want to, because I haven't felt able to do it justice, yet. I suspect I'm going to end up somewhere between Pirate Borg and Worlds Without Number ship to ship combat, but playing as the ship, once I finally do bite the bullet.