Nomad Terror said:
One of the things I like about the Homeworld games are the 3d formations.
Funny, what I didn't like about Homeworld were the 3D formations.
They were pretty, but didn't seem to add much. Sometimes the formations were more of a pain to maintain than a help for blasting the baddy of the minute.
Anyway, some things to think about:
1) Combat in the air and space is both three dimensional. However, due to the lack of gravity, space is somewhat more three dimensional (you can fly inverted or sideways for extended amounts of time without getting a head rush or falling out of the sky, there's no concept of altitude besides don't run into that planet, etc.). I think removing these limitations actually makes space combat more simplistic, however; for instance, do a search for "basic air combat manuevers" and you'll turn up pages about energy management and very little about off-bore gunnery, which is almost completely opposite of what you'd expect for deep space.
2) The horizon is space is much longer, which complicates things in all sorts of way. Stealth and jamming is certainly going to be more important when you've basically got no cover/terrain (worse than even in the open ocean); submarines-in-space probably isn't too bad a metaphor. Related to this is that the speed of light starts to become important for luminal and subluminal sensors/weapons. Also, you can develop enormous amounts of speed over time; this plays a prominent role in the tactics used in the Wing Commander novels.
3) Contradicting some of what I said in #1, energy management would play some role in space combat, but it'd be on a much bigger time/distance scale. This is basically due to the gravitational wells set up by various celestial bodies, which creates an even more complicated potential energy pattern than in air combat. This is where you get such gimmicks as sling shot and aerobraking manuevers and the like. However, again due to the scale, I'm not entirely convinced it would be useful in a real combat situation, as you'd be talking about manuevers taking place over days, weeks, even months or years, but who knows. Another thing to consider about energy, though, to take a page from Heinlein, is that you can "drop rocks" down the gravity well (you can't actually drop things from orbit, you need to actively deorbit, but at least they'll accelerate and go splat).
4) To inject a bit of reality into all this, formation flying isn't actually used that much in real world air combat. Formations are generally used for going to/from the destination, and if you're dropping bombs, well, you'll probably stay in formation, too. For dogfights, maintaining a tight finger four isn't the best thing in the world.
The basic unit of real world air combat is a two-plane element (the official name for which escapes me at the moment), basically the wingman/buddy system, where you've got someone to work with to beat the stuffing out of the bad guys, leading the enemy into the sights of your buddy and having someone to guard your back. This is a basic truth you can even find reiterated numerous times in the Wing Commander manuals and game play; more complicated tactics are built from this two-plane units.
5) Really modern jet air combat with guided missiles is about picking up the other guy on radar and launching your air-to-air missiles at him.
In this respect, it resembles Prophecy/Secret Ops a lot. A good sim if you want to play around with this is Falcon 4.0. This tends not to be as exciting as a dogfight, though, which probably explains the relative popularity of sims for earlier time periods compared to the latest jet fighters.
6) I-War/I-War 2 has a neat Newtonian flight model if you're interested in what combat in space would be like in real life (well, minus some of the fancy science fiction gizmos). I-War 2 in particular is lots of fun, if you can get the hang of it (main tip here is to play it more like an FPS than a traditional flight sim).
7) Babylon 5 also had a Newtonian flight model, if you want to look at some of the Starfury tactics used in that series' combat sequences. One of the major differences between space combat vs. atmospheric is that you have a very tight turn radius, practically 0 in many cases (used to great effect by the Starfuries). This is true even in the Wing Commander flight model (Shelton slide, autoslide, etc.). This makes it much easier to aim than to dodge (because of inertia, you'll tend to keep moving in a straight line), so offensive tactics will really dominate over defensive in space. Compounding this is the lack of cover mentioned in #1. In this way, space combat will be a lot more like naval combat than ground combat: a key tactical maxim in naval combat is to attack first-est with the most-est; everything else is secondary, and reserves just divide your force uselessly.
These points are a mix of things that would apply to real life space combat physics and Wing Commander, so not all of them apply to each case. Still, I hope they provide some inspiration for further thoughts along these lines.
