Saint_Proverbius said:
I haven't seen even one spacesim where ships use their jump/warp/spacetime embolism/whatever-drives as prime movers in combat (which might actually be quite awesome), and no, it wouldn't produce "ships are WW1 fighters, teehee!" effect.
If you're advanced enough to come up with a method of star hopping, you're advanced enough to come up with a way to make your fighter behave in space the way it does in an atmosphere.
If you're advanced enough to come up with a metod of flying faster than sound, you're advanced enough to make your fighter behave like a war horse on the medieval battlefield.
Wait, what?
Look at X2. Newtonian physics and a shit control scheme killed what could have been a stellar game(pardon the pun).
What.
If you're bending space in order to get from star A to star B...
...and are inclined to make the space feel like non-space, you make your spaceships indulge in crazy and awesome things in combat like warping around at mental pace, surfing spatial embolisms to move faster, crush the enemy vessels with localized gravity fields, inject antimatter into their shield bubbles through DIY wormholes and generally make some major strides into the realm of pure awesome, while smashing occasional planet or two, because it got caught into crossfire.
Under no circumstances you should make your super duper awesomely advanced fighters mimic the aerodynamic limitations of fighter planes, only to give them ultimate combat advantage of not being able to fly backwards/sideways.
Fighter planes don't bank when turning because it's cool. They do it, because they have shitty propulsion systems, rarely capable of propelling them with force greater than their weight, and have to rely on aerodynamic forces when manoeuvring. I recently mentioned anachronism inherent in even most realistic combat spacesims. I think, that, to future generations, they'll appear steampunkish, featuring clumsy machines with outdated look and technology incapable to yield such performance, doing cool things in a completely inefficient and anachronistic ways. It's still millions of times better than arcadeish ones - forget about jetfighters and muskets - stick a jousting lance on SR71 'Blackbird' to catch a glimpse of how ridiculous
they will look. I'll rather stick to the Newtonian spacesims, thankyouverymuch.
If someone ever makes a convincing space sim where you'll be flying super advanced craft using spatial embolism propulsion all the time, boil away planets and twist the fabric of space to give enemies a wedgie, I'm sold. Not before.
So far the only available alternative to newtonian model is arcade one, which is neither pretty nor cool enough for me to bother.
Actually, if you're too unimaginative, to get space wedgie combat right, and for some reason can't handle Newtonian, you can still win me over. It's simple. Drop the SF trappings. All of them. Yes you. Now, make an arcadeish flight-sim where I can fly a dragon, of big, scaly kind. One that breathes fire, casts weaponized spells of mass destruction, and eat enemies alive. He can throw in a snarky comment too, once in a while.
There, you've got me.
And leave the space-sims to those who can do them right.
@Data4:
Cool, too bad, that you can't see much through the cockpit windows, though I doubt if you'd be able to catch a glimpse of the Earth even after the shuttle starts to reorient itself in order to get into orbit.
@Disconnected:
Well, there are always various kinds of countermeasures. You can sidestep inert mass launched at you if you detect it in time. You can destroy guided one with your own projectile and sidestep the debris, etc. Such game might still be interesting, if done right.
We also don't know the exact scenario - while large scale battles might look like what you described, the realistic spacesim might very well involve fending off small scale intruders at close ranges as corporate rentacop.
