[QuarianRex]

SJ seems to have it covered but I did discover something about fleet order yesterday. If it is based on the order outside of combat then this might help.

I was setting aside some ships to trade to the neighbouring empire and for the first time I decided to change their names (due to retrofitting I had some ships with the same name and didn't want some other guys ship parked over my homeworld). I renamed them "Gift 1", "Gift 2", etc. to keep them straight and they rearanged themselves in that order (i started from the bottom and went up).

You should be able to use this to put your fleet into the order that you want. Even just renaming them as the appropriate number should do it.

Then again I could be remembering this wrong. At the time I didn't make any connection with fleet composition. Please give it a try and post whether it works or not.