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Note on fighters: I was thinking that as well, fighters can probobly do a little more maneuvering then a capital ship but for the most part they'd still have to come in 'streight and level' to eving begin an attack run, and while they were doing that the cap ships would dust them.
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Not really. Take everything you know about jet planes and throw it out the window.
In space, facing is wholely irrelevant as far as inertia is concerned. You can quite easily face your target and fire at it while moving in any direction. Fire some side thrusters to change your facing without affecting your direction of travel significantly. Go watch some Babylon 5 episodes with fighter combats. They did it rather well in that show.
The difference between tiny craft, such as fighters, and gigantic craft, such as dreadnoughts, is that the tiny craft do not have much mass to whip about, combined with being rather small. The stress and shearing forces caused to the ship are far, far more drastic when you have a massive vessel compared to a small one. The small ones can execute wacky maneuvers far more easily than can a huge vessel. If you were to try and take a dreadnought and rotate it 180 degrees in a few seconds, you would probably rip it in half (or many more pieces). Maybe if it was a perfect sphere (or perhaps ellipsoidal even) you could design it to be structurally stable enough to perform fighter-like manuevers, but definitely not some other shape. Odd shapes become harder and harder to make reinforced and resitent to rapid maneuvers as the object gets more massive.
Make sure not to base anything on Star Trek. They have a cheesy "warp field makes mass negligible" effect going.