The Battle UI is very cluttered and takes away from the game experience. I realize you can hide the entire UI, however this seems like a band aide fix. The layout needs corrected. The current layout makes for clickable areas of the screen to control ship direction limited. It sucks during battle when you need to change direction and click anywhere near the chat window. The issues that are rather glaring are as follows:

1) Simply hiding the chat window does fix this but removes communication with team.

2)The weapons area could be changed to increase screen real estate. Instead of vertical set it up horizontal across the bottom. 

3) The ship speed and direction indicator could be shrunk drastically. Get rid of the radial all together. Replace it with 7 dashes vertically against the far left. The color of the dashes would show the speed and/or direction. Say solids for forward and flashing for reverse. Place knts and ship direction just to the right of the dashes. 

4)The chat window.. Oh the chat window. This thing needs serious work. Lots of features displayed which are not needed. Those features could be easily mapped to keyboard shortcuts. Or hidden entirely until the chat window is activated by pressing enter.