Sorry I missed this comment, I didn't get a notification. I have seen it and drive speed does have some effect on it but it seems to be more a pathing/ai/engine issue than a drive value issue. It can be mitigated by making the bigger ships faster but at the expense of making them much more valuable.

I believe the root issue is that the game doesn't have a concept of thrust being only from the rear of a ship so while the ship has turned, the acceleration isn't yet moving it toward the new heading. The result is the ship will slide across the battlefield for a short bit until the acceration catches up.

If you watch squadrons with larger ships you can see a similar thing happening as they skid around to get back into position. You'll also notice this oddity on fast but slow turning ships like the 5x ironclad.

With the Ironclad, you can actually click around enough that the ship will fly backwards never managing to turn the front of the ship to the direction of travel. This is one of my last issues with the mechanics of tactical that one day Sol will fix :)

To some degree, the sluggishness of large ships like titans and battleships is intentional. They have heavy firepower but can potentially be out of position or require you to slow your fleet considerably to have them tank enemy attacks. You can overcome the limitation with teleporters to get them in ahead of the fleet if you like. In your specific case, I wouldn't attempt to turn a titan around I'd just reduce the speed so that a different titan will take the lead.

Looking at this a bit more, I think some of the issue is indeed with the acceleration settings for the hulls. I incorrectly understood how that was working and set it much lower than it needed to be.

The actual speed calc is a bit odd and uses base drive and best drive along with your drive bonus to figure out the combat speed but setting the acceleration too low results in that skidding you see as the ship model rotates to the new heading but the actual change takes much longer to happen due to the higher speed and lower acceleration in the new direction.

I've worked through all of the hulls and adjusted the acceleration for 3.3. It seems to work a bit better resulting in less skidding and more natural appearing turns at least from nuclear drives through Ion drives.

Looks nice ! I'll try in a new game to see the result on large ships and higher drives (including the very-high tech one). Let me know when you'll release it so I can test it ;) Thanks !

This isn't a live change yet, but I did ping you in case you want the updated setting to give it a go.