Fighters are rather silly things in a show or game involving more accurate flight models, and one of the problems is that these media often wish to use them. They could, you know, make destroyer-scale vessels manned by a single person with a good degree of automation and tracking missile turrets instead of fixed-gun fighters. I think here, more than anywhere else, is where truth is more exciting and alien than anything we see in popular fiction.Adrian Laguna wrote:I managed to get a kill on my first mission. Technically I rammed my enemy to death rather than shooting it down, but it was still a kill. My second kill was the result of missle spam. The third, fourth, and fifth (Nials in the mission generator) where missle spam and the use cavalier use of wingmen as expendable cannon fodder. Quite frankly, I think a Turanic Raider Missle Covette would assrape all B5 fighters. Missle pods ftw!Nephtys wrote:Try playing B5: I've Found Her, and actually getting a single kill on your first mission. Just TRY it.
There's a little freeware game out there, I forget what it's called... one sec. Here we go--Space Combat 140. It's a real-life space simulator designed around flying rather than fighting, but it does include some weaponry. Download it and play around with fighter designs, I made a pretty wicked one by giving myself just nose-mounted thrusters--twice as many as normal on the front rather than all over and I could very snappily change my orientation. Instead of a joystick I used the numpad to manually fire my thrusters, so it was less of an airfighter than a gridfighter. Personally, I never really got into I-War. I wasn't the physics, but the actual gameplay that got to me. I felt like I was pending all my time strafing rather than doing big burns with heated exchanges of laserfire.
There's another anime called PlanetES which specifically talks about real-life space within the context of space debris clouding earth orbitals. Concepts like a small object moving at high speed blowing holes in starcraft are par for the course. There is, unfortunately, still some plot involved. I found it enjoyable, since the plot is mostly a mechanism for talking about future societal issues and space's impact on Earth, so poke around and see if you can find it.