Star Wars Rebels is just not for me. I understand other people like it, and that's great. It's just not my taste.

I admit I am an ignorant in regards to the Wing Commander series, so I cannot really participate in the discussion in a meaningful way.
The only entry of that saga that I have played was Privateer, but I played it for many many years.

Perhaps I was too used to the X-wing flight model, but I never felt the need of using any sliding maneuvers while dogfighting in Privateer. Perhaps it was most effective against bigger ships?

I play a lot of Elite Dangerous, and that game has a mix of newtonian and non-newtonian physics with the flight assist thingie. You can spin around while keeping your velocity to aim your weapons to where you want.

I will say, and please feel free to correct me, these spins and slides would not be really effective in the X-wing series, even if we added them. And I think so for these reasons:

- As you have mentioned, AI in the X-wing series is terrified of flying on a straight line. Sliding, as in your ship keeping its current velocity vector while its nose actually aims elsewhere, wouldn't be really different from firing a turret from a ship that moves on a straight line, right?
Well, since the AI would be turning left and right to get away from your firing arc and getting an arc of its own, it wouldn't really be much easier to hit. You would need to lead a target that is moving erratically on a direction that is perpendicular to where you are looking at. This is usually much harder than firing at a ship from behind or from the front, because the leading distance covers a bigger angle of your view.

- Flying on a straight line in the X-wing series during a dogfight means imminent death for you (that is why getting the flight control system damaged means death most of the time). The AI leads its targets pretty well if they fly on a straight like, so even while you would be spinning around to get a shot on your target, you would be an even much easier target yourself since you would keep flying in the same bearing you had before "disabling the non-newtonian mode".
Remember that dogfights in Star Wars rarely involve only 2 ships. Most of the time it's a rebel ship ganked by 3 or more fighters. Even in the case that your sliding or spinning allows you to down one pursuer, you'd have two more firing at a target moving on a straight line.

- While the Privateer manual recommended using the sliding technique against bigger ships, I think it would be a terrible terrible idea in X-wing. Capital ships are dotted with turrets that lead their targets very well even at distances of kilometers. They are usually easy to deal with if you use flying wavy patterns or spiral patterns to approach, disengage or navigate close to them.
Definitely, sliding to attack a frigate or corvette would mean that you are blown up pretty fast since you are a as much a sitting duck by moving on a straight line as if you were actually sitting on the spot. You cannot fool the AI with speed. Only with constant changes of direction.

- The X-wing series got to have their own version of this spinning around from XvT and on, in the sense that by lowering your throttle dramatically increased your angular acceleration, allowing your ship to turn much faster than it usually could in X-Wing and TIE Fighter.
My personal opinion doesn't matter, but I never liked this, since it turned the clumsiest B-wing into a TIE Interceptor just by taking your foot off the gas pedal. That didn't make any sense to me, and I actually believe that was detrimental for the series, because it evened out all fighters by making them all as agile in dogfights as any other. Slumbering Y-wings would turn now on a dime to shoot down the fighter that flew past it.
I remember modding the Assault Transport so that it would be flyable in multiplayer skirmishes, and that was ridiculous, when you could lower the throttle to 33% for a second and let you spin around like a madman in such big ship 6-8 frontal cannons...

- There is actually one maneuver in the X-wing series that the AI can do but the player can't. It reminds to sliding but in a very different way. I call it "drifting" or "strafing" in the code because it isn't properly referenced anywhere else in the manuals. It's an undocumented feature that is used by the AI bombers while attacking capital ships to survive the ship's turrets.
It consists on moving laterally or up and down without actually changing their bearing or velocity vector. This movement is very subtle, practically imperceptible if you don't know what you are looking at. As if done not by the engines, but by the repursorlift projectors of the ship. It's never faster than 3-5 meters per second or around that, so it's not like you can use it to evade starfighter fire.
However it is effective when facing a capital ship. The AI strafes erratically in this way, up, down, left, right... randomly. That is enough to confuse the target leading of turrets and get hit less often than if it flew in an actual straight line.
For some time I considered letting the player do this with the help of holding some button or something like that. But I think it could break balance a bit.

Oh, I think it would indeed... as you just stated, this is an effective tool against capital ships, and the one thing that is always dangerous for the player is charging head on a cap ship, since you have to balance keeping the target in reticle versus dodging turret fire. A staople point of the game has always been finding the best angle of attack, or even a blind spot if available, to minimize the turret threat

A "WASD" strafe would make this so much easier to do, without the AI having any possible adjusting for it... the timing of turrets in the original is slowed just enough so that you can pitch and jaw around it and regain target, but if you could also strafe around, it would make them sitting ducks even against laser only fighters

Since your goal, which I love, is to keep the engine fully compatible with the old game and old mission format, that would be detrimental because you either screw the balance on one side, or change the AI and screw the balance on other sides... as you said, keep this on a "TO DO" for some possible mod support, but not in the base game

Hey, no argument there. X-Wing and TIE Fighter are superior to any Wing Commander game. ;)

Sense of depth was indeed awful in Wing Commander and Wing Commander II. Privateer was, I think, much better, though: by then they'd refined it quite a bit.

In Privateer they avoided Capital ships as much as possible and most ships you encounter are more or less on your scale and indeed it works much better. Asteroid fields are still awful though.

@Azrapse

I basically agree with your whole post about sliding. Originally, I brought it up because in other similar games, the drift feeling just feels awesome. However, I've been playing the X-Wing series again only recently and I don't think sliding would fit in these games either. It just doesn't fit.

I don't really play Elite Dangerous anymore, but I loved cutting out the flight assist, boosting after an escaping ship, and shooting them down "turret style" while flying past them. Feels so cool.

I play XvT regularly and also played Alliance recently and the effect isn't quite that dramatic, the B-wing and Y-wing while can become more manouverable they don't get quite to T/I level, I'm not even sure if they get to T/F level, also at 1/3 throttle such slow crafts are basically sitting ducks in most combat situations.
Imperial fighters have still a huge advantage because their base angular acceleration is still much higher than most rebel craft.
Obviously it wasn't meant for non-fighter crafts but I think the problem was that in multiplayer the bombers really became sitting ducks against human opponents and needed a bit of an edge to survive.

How goes the y wing cockpit interior and the Star Destroyer coming along? Fantastic work btw

Speaking for the Star Destroyer, I can say that it's moving along - I'm texturing it now, hoping to have it done soon!

Depends on how frequently you go around Perry, particularly with contraband;)

Seriously, though, I agree: mostly the scale of ships is more moderate and that probably helps. Know what works, eh?
I can't wait to see it, particular in flight! So exciting!

So I had a dream I was playing the new updated x wing. Then I woke up. Lol funny and sad dream at the same time. Can't wait to play for real. :)

Did you find any bugs? :)

Well the design was just a bit of fun on my part, and an effort to address the question of what it would look like with a design that merges the original X-Wing with the later games.

I put together an updated mockup based on your feedback (although I'd put the TIE Interceptor at 110 from memory, which may or may not be correct, plus would have been based on TIE Fighter rather than X-Wing ;-) ). I think the overflow is a good idea - a lighter blue bar could overlay on top of the existing bars and would maximise space.

I agree that readability could be a bit of an issue - I think that this type of design would work quite well for high-res monitor setups, but I imagine it would be a bit trickier at 800x600! At that point, the choice of font and rendering method would be quite important, I expect.

For this particular example, I've used Profont which I've mentioned previously, which looks quite close to the original - although I didn't realise how blocky it gets at larger sizes until I did the mockup.

However, I think that the really important aspect of whatever font is eventually used (in whatever targeting computer design is used in the actual release) is that it is monospaced - from a UI standpoint, this actually makes things easier since you can control the format of the string yourself - since you know exactly how many character spaces you have to work with. It also fits quite nicely with the military computing aesthetic.

I've also included an extra version where the ETA is formatted differently - this would be a static counter (and I believe a safe position given the limits on the number of F/G name characters in the original game)

Nope no bugs, but I was cursing at it cause it was tough to play. :) Just like the old days, lol.