Is there any space combat game with move to ship commands?

Move to being the same as third person control that is relative to the camera and not a cockpit. Think of it as a character on screen instead of in first person view. You press where you want to go, not how you want to move, which is relative to him/herself. Controls change when the characters get in a vehicle, but they shouldn't, because the physics can adapt to an universal scheme.

Not sure I follow. Can you rephrase?

I will try. Imagine the following controls:

• WASD - acceleration, reverse, slide left and right
• QE - roll left and right
• Shift - slide down
• Spacebar - slide up
• Mouse - pitch and yaw

In two camera modes:

1. Cockpit view - you press to accelerate forward, the ship goes forward relative to your view, and the same thing happens to any other direction or rotation.
2. Orbiting view - you move the mouse to rotate the view around the ship, which goes forward relative to itself, but not in the same direction as the input.

The game that I want to find has the following set up: you press WASD and the ship will rotate by itself to match the direction of the key relative to the camera and move there. Since the ship has to be present on screen, the camera won't control its pitch and yaw, but orbit around the former to define where you want to move.

Ahh now I get it. It's a cool concept but I can't think of any game that does it, sorry.

Thanks for considering it at least. Perhaps I should look into EVE Online's manual controls to see how the ships move. I heard good and strange things about it.

Sadly no not really.. It's one of a handful of types of games that with today's tech would be great, but nobody has got around to doing it. :(

Maybe mods may address that. I bet there's a forum or a subreddit somewhere dedicated to space combat games, where somebody knows.

Not sure I follow but Space Engineers allows you to look in 1st person, 3rd person, free camera roam and of course walk around in ship.

Perhaps we don't have gamepads for that as well. I mean, imagine the analog stick handling movement in two axes, the right one controlling the camera, both triggers to elevate or descend, and the bumpers to roll with the camera. What fingers are we left with to control the weapons, the afterburner, counter measures, their selection, etc.? Paddles solve the issue, but they're not the standard, at least now.

Recently, Overload seems to have done that quite well.

@Black_Knight_00 Overload is a game that fits perfectly in this description:

What I want is something that isn't inside the cockpit, but a camera that rotates around the ship, for its movement keys to command where it goes to. The ship will then rotate by itself, because it needs to do so on screen, while QE roll the camera on its own axis. I take it that it doesn't exist, but I will check Space Engineers as well, so thank you @tryit