Bittercon: Strategies and Tactics in Space Battles
Here's another interesting item from the Windycon programming schedule. It's noteworthy that the description starts with the comment about not just being naval battles in space, because a lot of the early space opera combat scenes were pretty much Age of Sail combat In Space. Even today, both David Weber (Honorverse) and David Drake (Republic of Cinnabar Navy) have made good careers with just that formula.
In a lot of space opera anime, we see combat that seems to recall World War II in the Pacific, with its carrier operations. We see large spaceships delivering large numbers of smaller combat spacecraft, often modeled heavily on airplanes (although typically more like a modern jet fighter than the propeller-driven aircraft, perhaps because jets are enough like rockets that it's believable to make such vessels dual-mode), that can fight out of visual range of the mothership. And often we see them maneuvering in space in manners that recall WWII dogfighting rather than actual orbital mechanics.
However, now and then we see actual physics taken into account in portrayals of space combat, as with the Starfuries of Babylon 5, which can flip around and fire at targets behind them while continuing on their forward trajectory. Even there, we often see a fair amount of fuzziness about such details as their maximum speed, to the point that it was often joked that they flew "at the speed of plot."
In a lot of space opera anime, we see combat that seems to recall World War II in the Pacific, with its carrier operations. We see large spaceships delivering large numbers of smaller combat spacecraft, often modeled heavily on airplanes (although typically more like a modern jet fighter than the propeller-driven aircraft, perhaps because jets are enough like rockets that it's believable to make such vessels dual-mode), that can fight out of visual range of the mothership. And often we see them maneuvering in space in manners that recall WWII dogfighting rather than actual orbital mechanics.
However, now and then we see actual physics taken into account in portrayals of space combat, as with the Starfuries of Babylon 5, which can flip around and fire at targets behind them while continuing on their forward trajectory. Even there, we often see a fair amount of fuzziness about such details as their maximum speed, to the point that it was often joked that they flew "at the speed of plot."