I prefer my space battle rules abstract. Star Wars 1st ed was perfect, where spaceships had a speed rating expressed as dice, which were added to your piloting skill in order to catch up with/pull away from the other ship, and that distance was expressed as an abstract short/medium/long range.
Unfortunately, such systems rarely work well with multiple ships involved.
I don't remember Alternity's rules for positioning and such, other than that there was a sourcebook called Starships which had both a more detailed and a more abstract system. I do remember that it was designed to involve multiple PCs - one-man fighters were pretty sucky, it was much better to have a somewhat larger ship where you could have one person manning the sensors, one on the guns, one on the defense systems, one piloting, and one telling the others what to do (Leadership skill could give the other guys a bonus). That's one thing I really liked about it.