Independence War I and II were brilliant space sims that used the cockpit to good advantage. They also put you in charge of a small destroyer, not a nimble single-seater. You have to manage task assignments for your crew in addition to just aiming and firing. Combine that with newtonian physics like mass and inertia, and you've got a thinking man's space sim. It had a bit of a learning curve, but it paid off in spades.
Independence War II in particular was a free-form game of space battles and piracy. It gave the player a *lot* of freedom in a vast playspace: fly around the planets, hop from star to star, take on sub-missions if you like, pursue the main goal at your own pace, customize and ambush and generally do what you please.
GOG, this title would be a real treat to add to the collection. Definitely worth a couple of bucks.

The VF-22S from Macross Plus. It hooked into the pilots nervous system and they controlled the plane-robot-spaceship-thing like they would their own body, or something. Maybe others in the rather long and convoluted series had something similar but thats the one I know.

I suffer from severe claustrophobia; just looking through the image of a cockpit is enough to make me feel faint. [/lie]
In truth, I don't feel that being able to see the lines of your own cockpit would improve the gameplay much. It'd add a little to your visual experience, but in a game like Freespace not having a full field of vision can literally mean the difference between life and death.

I agree. To refuse to play a game for such a trivial issue like this is absurd.

Yeah you need to grab [url=]http://www.egosoft.com/games/x2/info_en.php[/url] X2: The threat the X universe games are quite possibly the greatest games ive ever played. I spent nearly a year playtime playing them. thats on and off loading games over the course of a few years when i was younger.
They look amazing, the X series marks the Epoch of space flight sims. also X3 has a cockpit mod which is wonderfull [url=]http://www.egosoft.com/download/x3/bonus_en.php[/url]
I cannot stress the greatness of X3, also Earth and Beyond is another title you might like it has everythign your looking for.

I'm really surprised no one has mentioned either X-wing versus TIE Fighter or the immortal Wing Commander series (esp 3 and 4) as those are awesome games which have options for cockpit and non-cockpit flight. Back in hs my friends and I would get on microsoft gaming network (haha remember that one?) and blast each other to bits in xvt as we flew epic battles where star destroyers fought calamari cruisers. Good times.
The WC series just about defined space combat for the years it lasted (with a few hiccups) and the fmv games, while cheesy in hindsight really helped bring one into the universe. Try to find these games and use dosbox if you need to.

TIE Fighter, X Wing, XvT, and the rest of the LucasArts series are all great if you want a cockpit.
Me? If I wanted a cockpit, I'd put some wings on my Camry and act like I'm flying an A Wing. But you don't see me doing it.
Freespace takes the cake, cockpit or not.

well, honestly, cockpit windows really wouldn't be that useful in space combat, most of the time you probably couldn't see any foes in the darkness of space unless they're lit up like a super nova. I would assume most advanced space fighter planes (assuming they exist at some point) will be mostly an enclosed cockpit (unless atmospheric flight is also used) with sensors feeding the pilot with a 360 FOV of everything going on around into their screens/helmet/vision/brain/etc

Remember the Wing Commander series?
In those games one could have HUGE parts of the cockpit taking out most of the screen.
Maybe it was because of the system limitations of that era, but from todays point of view, that is just a bit too much.

I don't understand the OP's correlation between not having a cockpit and being an arcade shooter. Seems quite off-base to me.

I think not having a cockpit view is a deliberate design choice as it restricts view, as many have mentioned already. Cockpit view just degrades the experience in my opinion. Having an unobstructed view of space with just a HUD in front of you more effectively conveys the expansiveness (and sometimes isolation) of space. I won't deny it would be pretty sweet if the game supports very large monitors with super-high resolutions or even head-tracking technology, in which case I'd be inclined to use the cockpit view.

me two cents...