There seem to be a few different tropes here, and I think they need to be separated out. It has Space Dogfight as a redirect, so "dogfighting in space" is one usage. The article itself talks a lot about the differences in space dogfighting and aerial dogfighting, so it's partially a subtrope of Space Does Not Work That Way — but it also includes examples that do obey the laws of physics, so it's not that, either. I've fairly certain I've seen it used in wicks as "dogfighting" as opposed to "blasting your opponent to scrap from 100 km away with missiles", too, though I can't remember where that was.

Here's what I would suggest:

• Create a generic "air to air combat" trope if we don't have one already (I looked, but couldn't find anything). That would cover general Cool Plane vs Cool Plane or Space Fighter vs Space Fighter combat scenes.
• Repurpose Old-School Dogfighting for dogfighting specifically (ie, the type of air-to-air combat that involves Chasing Your Tail trying to get behind the other guy, rather than just shooting missiles from any which way) — also covering both air and space fighters.
• Create a new trope for the Space Does Not Work That Way subtrope "Space Fighter maneuvering like a Cool Plane".

I saw a YKTTW for the regular dogfighting variant recently...

Found

First line and for the most part the aversions are marked as aversions so this page is Space Dogfighting.

Rather a stupid name for that then, I guess.

The problem with your three step plans is that steps 1 and 2 are making pages for things that aren't tropes, no pattern, no convention, nothing that stops X, Just...X being a full and proper description. Just rename the page if it bothers you.

That's specifically for large-scale aerial battles involving lots of combatants, not just generic air-to-air fights.

Sword Fight is a trope, so why not Aerial Combat?

Dogfighting In Space seems good to me.

I don't think "dogfighting" and "dogfighting IN SPACE" are really distinct tropes — they're played exactly the same. The problem is that we don't have a generic dogfighting trope, which is why I want to make Old-School Dogfighting the general dogfighting trope — since it's already being used as such in some places — and spin off Air To Air Combat and Space Aerodynamics (or whatever) into separate tropes.

One additional thing that might be worth clearing up in this trope's description, since it seems implied but isn't explicitly stated:

This is mostly about space combat drawing on WWI / WWII-era dogfighting tactics, right? I'm hardly an aviator, but I don't think that even modern aircraft generally use tactics like the ones we see in most space shooters.

The trope is, basically, about how Small Reference Pools mean that everyone uses World War-era movies and media about aerial combat as the reference for what all types of flying-vehicle-combat are like.

When they're not using WWII naval combat instead. Actually, that's a huge part of this trope, since part of the reason Old-School Dogfighting shows up in Space Opera is because the association of capital ship = aircraft carrier and fighter = well, fighter! I think it's important to reference Space Is an Ocean in the description, since the two tropes frequently go together.

(Also, it might need a rename — is it being misused as a general-purpose dogfighting trope outside of its own page?)

EDIT: They're distinct tropes in the way that Space Is an Ocean compares to naval combat tropes — that is, the mass appropriation of aerial dogfighting tropes for space combat is, itself, a trope. Treating smaller ships as fighter jets or bombers is one of the cultural shorthand ways people use to describe space combat right along side turning larger ships into naval-style battleships and aircraft carriers.

It's how writers make space combat meaningful to readers. You could totally picture a model of space combat that all takes place outrageously far away and which consists mostly of firing and then waiting to see who explodes, but it wouldn't be relatable or interesting.

Well, actually, I've seen that done, usually by using submarine warfare as the comparison — but you get the idea. Perhaps it's part of a larger trope, where writers use some familiar terrestrial modern-day or historical reference to represent futuristic space stuff, in order to get readers engaged in it.

I think most writers know exactly what they're doing with this trope and why they're using it. It's important that the page not show it as an 'error', either. It's a way of telling stories, not a mistake.

edited 29th Jan '12 9:34:37 AM by Aquillion

That's the distinction I'm trying to draw between "air to air combat" (two or more aircraft trying to shoot each other down) and "dogfighting" (two or more aircraft trying to maneuver behind each other in order to use a Fixed Forward Facing Weapon). I think Old-School Dogfighting should be for the latter, we should make an Air To Air Combat trope for the former, and the whole "Space Fighter as Cool Plane" thing is something else entirely.

That's probably true... But is that part of a larger trope, or is it specific to "Space Fighter = Cool Plane"? Do we need a Space Dogfight trope, or just a general Space Is The Sky (see Space Friction, Space Clouds, etc) thing?

Yes.

• Ace Online: "Battles tend to result in lots of close-combat fighting"
• BattleTech: "Aerospace fighters behave this way when fighting in atmospheres" (though it mentions they do the same thing in space, too).
• Boom, Headshot: A reference to TRON: Legacy, which isn't in space.
• Chasing Your Tail: Refers to dogfighting in general. (This is the one I was thinking of when I started the thread, incidentally.)
• Combat by Champion: "chivalrous Old-School Dogfighting with aircraft built of cloth and wood"
• Cosmic Deadline: Reference to Dark Void, a game about a guy with a jetpack.

I can do a full wick check if people want, but suffice to say that there is misuse.

Ok so IMO we need to rename this and create a few new tropes.

• Space Dogfighting
• Space Naval Combat (Broadsides and yada if it is really hard SF it will be Sub like combat.)
  • may be combined with fighters doing Space Dogfighting and Space Bombing Runs or Space Superiority Space Search And Destroy stuff if The Battlestar or Carriers and such acting like the roles of Space Aircraft Carriers...
  • If it is a Real Robot or Super Robot this maybe further combined with Space Sword or Hand to Hand Mecha Combat.

Overuse of "space" was intentional.

edited 29th Jan '12 10:24:39 AM by Raso

The Space Dogfighting is what we're discussing right now, and the Space Naval Combat is already covered by Space Is an Ocean and Standard Sci-Fi Fleet. (And for the record, hard sci-fi space combat is not like Hot Sub on Sub Action — the main form of defense for submarines is stealth, and Stealth In Space doesn't exist in hard sci-fi).

Space Dogfighting sounds pretty good to me.

I'd call it just Space Dogfight, but yes, it seems like a sound idea.

It is definitely a distinct trope. Dogfighting tactics are strongly dependent on the effects of gravity near Earth's surface; "space dogfighting" isn't just using the same rules somewhere else, it is using the same rules somewhere they explicitly wouldn't work the same. It is a trope in a similar way as Space Friction or Space Is an Ocean.

edited 29th Jan '12 3:17:11 PM by rodneyAnonymous

Standard Starship Scuffle is supposed to be "Space Naval Combat", though it doesn't see a lot of use on the wiki I think.

I don't think dogfighting in general is a trope, really. Dogfighting in space is a trope because it's a story-telling device — presenting space combat to the audience in the form of something more familiar, both to make it more relateable and for the Rule Of Cool.

I think a rename would be a whole separate discussion. Is there any specific evidence the current name, Old-School Dogfighting, isn't working?

edited 29th Jan '12 7:11:15 PM by girlyboy

No, it's not. It's a page, a badly made one that fails to deliver a trope where the "examples" are all unconnected and reproduce content from other, proper trope, pages.

Standard Starship Scuffle has a slight issue in that it's one long smash and grab of all the standard tropes you'll see in such a thing.

Aerial combat style dogfights in space are part of the standard set of expected tropes, the only aversion I can think of off the top of my head is Battlestar Galactica (Reimagined).

Should I, or someone else, launch Dog Fighting?

Dog Fighting would be about dogs fighting. The name you want is Dogfighting, or, preferably, just Dogfight.

Well, yeah, swap the current name with the obvious redirect for now, then let it wither.

I think we need to Trope Transplant the current Old-School Dogfighting page to something like Space Is Air (ie, space ships maneuvering like aircraft), and repurpose Old-School Dogfighting for actual dogfighting (IN SPACE or not). "Dogfighting" and "space craft acting like aircraft" are tropes, but "space craft dogfighting" just seems like The Same But More Specific, to me. If we decide that it's worthy of a subtrope, then I'd rather use Old-School Dogfighting as the general dogfighting trope and spin off Space Dogfight (currently a redirect to Old-School Dogfighting) as the subtrope.

It is not just Dogfighting IN SPACE! Dogfighting in space is a different thing, kind of Did Not Do the Research but more or less universal. Like Space Is an Ocean is not just An Ocean IN SPACE! It's not really a sub-trope either. Just "dogfighting" doesn't even seem like a trope.

edited 2nd Feb '12 10:40:35 AM by rodneyAnonymous

If it's not "dogfighting IN SPACE!" and it's not "space ships acting like aircraft", then what is it?

I'm also confused about what makes dogfighting less tropeworthy than any other specific types of combat, like Sword Fight, Knife Fight, or Showdown at High Noon. It's storytelling shorthand — if you say that a character was involved in a dogfight, you know that they're going to use their Improbable Piloting Skills and their Cool Plane to chase their tail and try to get behind their opponent so they can shoot them down.

Hell, the fact that people are using Old-School Dogfighting to refer to actual dogfighting seems to indicate that it's tropeworthy. Dogfighting has accumulated Wiki Magic despite not actually being a trope yet!

edited 2nd Feb '12 2:23:47 PM by NativeJovian

It is "space ships acting like aircraft". Who said it's not?

(And point: if Sword Fight etc are tropes then I guess Dogfight is too.)

edited 2nd Feb '12 3:48:50 PM by rodneyAnonymous

It's a specific type of fight scene. Just because fights happen in real life doesn't make them not tropes since it's rare for a fight to be included for no purpose at all.

I was talking about rolling the current definition of Old-School Dogfighting into a new Space Is Air trope about spaceships acting like aircraft in general, but it sounded like you didn't like that idea. I guess I misread?