Rewatching the Battle of Endor from Star Wars, it's amazing how unrealistic the space combat is. They have literal infinity around them, yet all the cruisers are within a kilometer of each other and clustered on the same two-dimensional plane. Then you have guys calling out stuff like "fighters from the left" and "Look out from above" when all directions would be relative to each individual. Then of course they're using visual flight rules when, once again, every direction is relative (though there is a moon, so that would help).

So my question is, are there any games that actually show the real way space combat would go down?

as soon as you see a coloured laser beam, or hear the pew pew sounds - no

:)

Edit - reminds me of another question: "What does a photorealistic orc look like?"

not sure if anyone could do so, and it may be incredibly boring. The inertia itself mean that it may take hours for a ship to turn around if it goes fast enough and is big enough.

Yes... EVE: Online... never played it because it's way to complicated for me, but I've played the PS3 spinoff/tie in game Dust 514, I remember one time there was such a big space battle that 2 things happend... first background, 2 player corp's got into a dispute over mining asteroids or something, so a mass message was sent to every one in the corp's about an all out war, in other words, shoot the other corp on sight... the outcome?

The entire Tranquility server lagged for 2 hours. (there is only one server in EVE, that's tranquility) The lagg even afflicted Dust which is also on Tranquility.

Prices for ammo rose majorly due to all the pilots buying ammo for their guns...

in other words, EVE might be your game lol

"Realistic" space combat in games is not fun.
Elite was fun because of the unrealisitc dog fighting. Frontier: Elite 2 had more realistic, but boring combat.

By the way, have you read books like the Honour Harrington series? They may be closer to pulp than hardcore, but I liked the depiction of space battles and maneuvers in them.

Agreed. The most "realistic" space combat I've seen in games was in Mission Critical (Can I has Mission Critical on GOG pretty please?), and all it consisted of was sending a bunch of unmanned drones to destroy another bunch of unmanned drones and doing it all from a tactical display on the mother ship.

Realistic? Yes. Boring? Double yes!

I'm not an economics major, so I would suck at EVE.

LMFAO

Star Citizen?

Elite: Dangerous?

The most fun space games in my opinion are the ones with unrealistic combat, star control 2, etc.

The Independence War series has fairly realistic space physics. Graphics are certainly a step up from games like Elite.

They are hard though. Never played IW2, but heard it was much harder than IW1.

I tired the demo for it and it's a dense game to get into, you've got to really spend allot of time playing it to learn all the mechanics. If i had time (and money due to hte subsription fee) I'd love it... buuuut I don't...

Plus side, it's been running 15 years (I think) and the dev's still fully support it.

Realistic space combat would end the second one of those giant ass ships blew up, spewing ultrasonic debris in every direction.

Everyone on Endor would have been trapped on the planet as the wreckage from the Death Star blowing up in that close of proximity would have formed an orbiting layer of space trash so thick you couldn't fly thought it.

it is called the kessler syndrome; one really bad space disaster could cause an orbiting cloud of shrapnel so thick we could never get back up into space.