Animesuprj is certainly your man when it comes to knowing the Vector games! He's better than any Google search out there!
I asked myself the exact same question regarding controls for vector games a while back. I wanted to design a vector mame control panel that would be as all-encompassing as possible but NOT look like a horrid FrankenMame monstrosity panel.
In the end, I went with the following layout, which I'm extremely happy about:
Two 8-way joysticks with fire buttons on top (classic Black Widow joystick placement locations).
Track Ball in Middle (for Quantum)
Spinner off to the side (For all the spinner games)
Several buttons on both right and left side of panel (for easy use with the majority of vector games).
The panel looks very clean and it's totally functional for ALMOST all the games.
I say ALMOST because, there are several controllers for Vector games that are clearly missing from my Vector Mame panel. I omitted the following controllers:
a) Star Wars Yoke
b) Major Havoc Roller
c) Lunar Lander Thruster
d) Speed Freak steering Wheel.
For these 4 Vector games, I decided NOT to attempt to put them on a vector mame panel. It just wasn't practical because these controllers are all large and would take up too much space on a single panel.... not to mention they are very expensive to either find an original or reproduction.
I also could have gone with multiple control panels, each with their own "proper" controller....but really? Who wants to go through all that work and have to disconnect, take out, put in different panels, reconnect... and hope everything works right, just to play a different game? It would ruin the experience and fun (plus it would never look good).
So I ended up owning the actual vector game cabinets for 3 of the 4 listed above in order to play the real game, rather than try to play them in Vector Mame (I didn't get Speed Freak which is such a crappy game and too hard to find even if I wanted the actual game).
I use the Braze Asteroids multi-kit with the Lunar Lander thruster on my Asteroids cabinet, which is great because you can get three excellent games on one Cabinet... and the Lunar Lander Thruster is awesome! (But expensive).
If you are willing to go with a vector mame cabinet using a Zektor ZVG card and PC setup, along with the control panel layout I've detailed above, I really think you are locked and loaded to play MOST every vector game ever made.
It's not perfect. Believe me. I know that. There are some issues with Vector Mame and the DOS drivers for the mouse that I'm currently not happy with (the spinner and track ball doesn't respond well enough....yet.... in my opinion. But it's being worked on and hopefully will be solved in the coming months).
Using 8-way joysticks is also not perfect, but honestly, you can play Battlezone and other games just fine. I haven't noticed any problem at all in that regard, so I decided not to deal with the switchable joysticks and all those added mechanisms (which is possible if that's important to you).
Anyway, sorry to ramble so long. But I think your initial question about wanting to know all the Controls needed to play all the vector games is a good one. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and also talking with other collectors behind the scenes before I finalized my control panel design.
I hope my experience helps you out. Would love to hear comments from others who are interested.