As of Entrenchment, each ship entity has the following line:

usesFighterAttack FALSE

Change it to TRUE, and you'll have your strafing ships.

Manshooter has a mod called Dynamic Movement that uses the Fighter movements for most ships. Also Distant Stars has an addon that lets you use this movement with Distant Stars. Alot of people like it. Personaly I tend to mirco my ships and them flying around trying to do passes at ships that are also doing passes on them....it tends to get hard to control ships not to mention they like to fly into SB range or mines. But to each their own.

There are problems associated with using dynamic flight paths that are exceptionally obvious in games like Homeworld 2 where it's become a fad to use movement systems. The obvious problem is that the ship will flail around and either move into range of more enemy weapons or move in a way that prevents targets from entering its own weapons arc or leaving that arc. This is especially a problem in most of the larger homeworld 2 mods who boast dynamic flight. I found it more irritating than helpful. Sure it looks cool to see ships flailing around, but half the time they are denying most of their weapon systems the opportunity to fire. Also, the projectiles are so fast that it never provides protection, it just comes off as a gimmick.

Because of Sins' limited weapon arc system that won't be as much of a problem for most ships if you give them 360 degree coverage on their weapons. But always take into account the ship design first. In my universe there are a lot of front-heavy or broadside ships and it doesn't make much sense for them to flail around. Some of them would circle their targets and keep a bead on them but to my knowledge it's not possible to code that into sins. Also, I do not believe that movement systems in sins allow you to dodge projectiles since the damage is not tied to graphics (at least I've never seen it so far).

Also, I like to keep the control in the hands of the player as much as possible. Dynamic flights take a large degree of control away from the player.