In another thread Blender (www.Blender.org) was brought up as a 3D animation tool. It's open source and free too.

You could import models of the ships and place them in 3D space. Then use the built in measurement tools to determine the distances and angles involved. The ability to pan and rotate the camera would be invaluable in that situation.

A nice projector or an HDTV with DVI inputs would be helpfull for the player at the back of the room to see what's going on.

All of this is assuming that you are gaming at a table, my idea won't help at all with remote players.

And you could make each turn a keyframe and output a rendering of the fight, should it need to be recorded for later.