oh okay makes sense, maybe you could have a 2 bit intro sequence or menu system and use black+white and 2 greys, and ship loadouts in menu could be something along those lines *shrugs*
btw is the one I edited side on or top down? it reads side on. I like the one in the test screen, which reads obviously top down. and as ptoing mentioned sprite resolution would help the rotation, or if you use vectorized pixels and have a higher resolution you'll get some pretty smooth rotation, 200x zoom will just zoom in on the identical effect, if it's emulating a fixed pixel resolution. but if you mean 2x scaled game assets then yeah that'll help it will have visible sub pixels when it rotates so
here is an illustration, with generic rotation, obviously the higher the resolution the smoother the turning, you just have to decide what angles you want, do you want it to rotate 8 angles in 45 degree increments? then 1x isn't too bad, but you want 16x rotation then even 2x produces artifacts, 3x is a sweet spot because the central pixel in the (upscaled 1px) cluster essentially acts as a pivot point for every upscaled pixel and is the resolution I'd lean towards if you have enough screen resolution for such sprites (which you should, if you make everything relative to a 320x240 display in mockups and tests and playfield planning , then that'd translate to the same aspect and resolution between the 3x sprites and screen to 960x720 which seems reasonable resolution and is only marginally larger than SVGA (800x600)
also I can see the logic in the lettering but it's incredibly hard to read, might be worth doing the method of having it repeated in small font under the title or something, because if not for the fact you mentioned it was called pulsar I wouldn't have been able to read that