Make it look right
I do like having lots of detail in a game - for me this is part of the athmosphere of a game :-)
The cool thing about being indie is, that you have as much time as you like to invest in whatever you personally prefer. For me I wanted the ships to behave like a player would do. So they are not using any sort of predefined animation, but instead using more or less player-like steering behaviour. At least, I try to do so.
Everything is moving
A big problem with that approach was, that asteroids are naturally rotating, so every building on the asteroid is in permanent motion - which can be quite tricky for a ship to land in such a hangar.
I thought about how I would land a ship in such an hangar and implemented that logic, so the ship first finds an appropriate landing vector, goes there and slowly decreases altitude to finally land in the hangar.
The ship will always try to find the lowest safe orbit (depends on how height buildings are) and decrease altitude from there. So as an asteroid colony planer you will aim for heaving your hangars as near as possible at the lowest orbit, so the ships will land faster.(Decreasing Heigh is a slow process)
In the video, you see a hangar placed on outmost part of an asteroid - this will be very near to the lowest safe orbit, so ships are able to nearly approach it directly.
To make all those things work, the AI has now some sort of movement prediction of their targets. In Fights this is also used to get a better aiming point to the target. The generell goal for the orbital figths will be to have some stunning looking action :-)
Realism VS cinematic
Some of you may mention, that the way the ships are moving is not physically right - they do move more like submarines than actual space vessels. You are right with that. I tried both approaches but we are very conditioned by Star Wars Movies and such things, that we have a distinct expectation about how it should look, even when it is physically wrong. I tried a simulation of physically correct fight's and they look just boring :-) BUT! I do think of defense drones, which has no main thrusters and will move freely in every direction - also the way of moving cargo between transporters and buildings is something we expect more realistically - so there will be a good mix (hopefully)
Looking cool there man.