Alright, I KNOW this is possible... it just has to be. Someone found the value that determines how a ship strafes up and down (I believe it was called vertical slide or something) and mapped THAT to a key, so maybe it's possible that someone can find the value that determines how a ship rolls and could map it to a key as well? It really irks me that there are no keys to roll because it would make the game so much more fun! Not to mention, flashy. I can't tell you how many times I've been strafing a station (or other such large and immovable object) and wanted to spiral my ship around to a certain point and then fly away by going straight up. It would also add a much needed sense of a third dimension to combat. Sure, you're flying around in space, it doesn't get much more three dimensional than that, but what I'm saying is that the game ENCOURAGES flat, 2-D battles. Think about it. All the enemies you encounter are flying along on the same plane as you. Everywhere you go, things are on a flat plane. It's like a freaking ocean. It seems like the creators were scared of implementing a third dimension or something. I mean, even the navmap is flat! There is no way for the map to guage the distance you've traveled up or down! Why couldn't they have a trade-lane going straight up? To some planet ABOVE the one you're at now? Why couldn't enemies ambush you from below? The only things that stuck out as being different in this game were a few stars that were positioned above the planets in their system. One of the Omega systems was like that, I think.
The problem as I see it is that it's hard to stop thinking about directions like up, down, left, right, forward, and back while in space, even though up can easily become down, right, or even forward due to lack of gravity. So, while it's nice that DA included a nifty little auto-orientation thingy, I really wish there were an option to turn it off and another to allow manual control rolling. It would feel a whole lot more like space if they did. I just can't shake the feeling that I'm playing on an open sea, without the sea and sky. Final message: SPACE ISN'T FLAT! Rant done.