My own two cents would be, it depends on your players. If they are new to gaming or the system and you want to 'Go Easy' on them, a single card play would be fine, but soon there would be a desire for more challenge. Adding complexity to suite the needs of the game/players is a back bone quality of this system. While coordinating up to 12 players in a 4'x 8' game area, so long as you had a GM to keep everyone on track, it worked fine. (mostly it was one ship per player)

I had thought at the time, that a helmsman could 'Up Helm' a maneuver and not make quite as tight a turn as shown on the card, allowing slight last minute adjustments which would be somewhat historically accurate.

Regarding the extended ruler idea, I would only consider this option if say, 6", or what ever seemed to be correct, was added to the end of the ruler, and so keeping some distance apart for easier maneuver. If you extended the short range kill zone by simply multiplying the lengths, it would take too long to close and no boarding actions would be possible without almost losing the ship and company before grappling.