Selecting Ships

I'm having problems selecting individual ships out of an entire stacks to access such features as "upgrade" "sentry" or "guard" -- and I can't find a hotkey shortcut for upgrade! -- and I'm wondering what the trick is. This would be especially usefull for ships that are "in orbit" around a planet that I want to upgrade "in place". Also needed to select 1 fleet out of 2/3 in a square that I'm using to besiege an enemy planet, so I can pull out damaged ships and rotate undamaged ones back in.

edit:

BTW, anyone else having trouble with using the "watch list" feature on the forums? I can't seem to get it to go -- every time I try it gives me an error message about a pool being full.