Yes, I have ideas on how to accomplish it, but it would be complex to be able to do it for hundreds of ships at once, and on the player's command, multiple times in the same mission, and being able to adjust how far back the jump is...
If you think you need to use hundreds of ships at once, you have usually made your first mistake. Second, you can't really use battuta's method (or any other method) to accomplish this, as there are three hard limits that will make it impossible. First, there's the ship limit, which limits you to 400 ships in-mission. Second, there's the object limit, which is the maximum number of objects that can be in the game at any given time, which is set to 3000. Note that
everything, from single laser bolts to missiles to asteroids to debris to ships, count against this limit. Third, we have the sexp variable limit (currently at 250), which determines the maximum number of variables you can declare in a mission. Your idea would require at least 7 variables per ship (3 to store coordinates, 3 to store orientation, 1 to store health), which makes hitting that limit rather easy.
And that is before we get into the technical (im-)practicalities of missions with that many objects. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that you have 100 ships in a mission, all of which fire 10 shots. This means we have a total of 1100 objects in the mission, which means the collision detection code has to do 1210000 collision checks each frame (in a worst case scenario, that is. The real number is somewhat below this.). This will slow down even the fastest computers, since collision checks and collision rejections are not exactly easy to do in a game.