What is this, exactly?: Old School Dogfighting

IIRC, "Bullets over Missiles" may harken back to pre-Guided Missile Age air warfare, where planes were only armed with machine guns and a limited supply of unguided rockets.

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But you also see it in a lot of modern stuff. Now, if you've got a good justification like laser beams, or really good CIWS/EW that actually works, you've got a good reason for it, but stuff like Star Wars where there aren't any actual Light speed lasers, not so much.

Star Wars does not use Newtonian Physics in their space fighters. This is what newtonian fighters use.

Fight smart, not fair.

I'm not sure Spaceships As Aircraft is a great name, since it implies spacecraft that can also operate in atmosphere, rather than spacecraft acting like aircraft even out of atmosphere. But that's neither here nor there — should we just go ahead an YKTTW the "space vehicles acting like aircraft" trope?

As for the proposed tropes, I'm not certain that "bullets over missiles" needs to be split from the general dogfighting trope. That's actually why I want to use the name Old-School Dogfighting for the general dogfighting trope — to make it clear that we're talking about the old school "get behind the guy and gun him down" style of air-to-air combat, not just any two Cool Planes fighting each other. I do think we need a general air-to-air combat trope, but the dogfighting trope would be a subtrope of that.

edited 22nd Feb '12 12:38:55 PM by NativeJovian

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The old school of dogfighting isn't limited to shooting down enemies with guns, at least in more recent times; short-range missiles like the AIM-9 heatseekers also figured into it, especially during the Vietnam War.

edited 22nd Feb '12 2:53:14 PM by MarqFJA

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Having played Tie Fighter to death I would very much agree. Dogfighting with a Missle Boat "King Hell God Emperor Starfighter of Death" it was usually getting behind a target or in his arc and getting a missile lock and firing or more fun get them in the tractor beam then fire.

The fact that it came with one pretty underpowered blaster (that just usually was better to just shunt into shield or speed.) but mandatory 50 missiles didn't help.

edited 22nd Feb '12 3:08:52 PM by Raso

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We could always call Space Is Air Etherial Rudder or some such.

If bullets over missiles is going here, where do we put the space fighters using WWII tactics, or are they all going here?

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True — didn't mean to imply that ("gun them down" was probably a poor choice of words). Using missiles that have to be fired from the enemy's rear arc would still count — but using long-range missiles or all-aspect missiles wouldn't. Laconic definition for what I think Old-School Dogfighting should be: Combat that involves Chasing Your Tail in a 3-D environment (midair, underwater, in space, etc). Most frequently used with small, nimble vehicles sporting a Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon.

Bullets over missiles is covered by Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better, I think.

edited 23rd Feb '12 3:24:10 PM by NativeJovian

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I think Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better includes missiles as kinetic weapons.

Yeah, the trope is "When high-tech societies use weapons similar to those in Real Life, rather than Energy Weapons", which refers to solid-projectile weapons, including missiles and rockets.

edited 23rd Feb '12 3:46:56 PM by MarqFJA

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Hm, rereading it, it actually seems to be "projectile weapons vs energy weapons" more than anything else. Maybe something like Ballistic Weapons Are Better is tropable? We could YKTTW it, at least.

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Maybe "No Such Thing As Guided Weapons"

Okay... "Bullets Over Missiles: Fighters use bullets instead of missiles as the dominant method of combat. Again, another break from reality, missiles tend to get used before guns AFAIK."

I really think trope-wise this can fit under old-school dogfighting. It's probably there for the same story-telling reason: It's exciting to show enemies fighting at close quarters; our brave flying ace hero looking at a computer screen and pushing a few buttons to launch a missile at something beyond the horizon isn't as exciting, most of the time. I don't think it needs to be its own trope, separate from dogfighting... Asides, from what I've seen, missiles are sometimes seen being used at short range in aerial combat, which fits under Old School Dogfighting; when they're not used at all, it's usually justified by, for example, the work being set in the past before missiles gained widespread use.

I don't really see the need for a distinction; missiles getting used extensively would just be what happens in shows that avert old-school dogfighting.

Since Dogfighting is defined as high-maneuver, close-quarters battles between aircraft, missiles are somewhat less useful than bullets. Combat at missile range is the more general "Air-to-air combat".

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Now that might be a good trope, In Gundam the Minovsky Particle causes this making long range guidance systems useless thus everything is close range and missiles are pretty much fire and forget or wire-guided (which would make them "Torpedoes" I think.) anything remote controlled has an extremely limited range.

Anyway Close range missiles modeled off say the sidewinder can easily be used in close combat.

edited 24th Feb '12 7:04:01 PM by Raso

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I think rather than getting caught up in other tropes, we have to focus on what we need to do at a bare minimum to get Old-School Dogfighting changed as proposed.

As I see it, we need, basically, to:

1) Change Old-School Dogfighting to be about all dogfights, rather than just ones that are in space.

2) Create a new trope that would be just about dogfights that are in space, to take over the original intended function of Old-School Dogfighting.

3) Create a "Space Is Air" trope to also take on some of what Old-School Dogfighting was supposed to be about originally, but with a different and more broadly applicable angle.

And then everything else — massive dogfights, bullets-over-missiles, etc. — can be left up to the natural YKTTW process, I think. These three things seem, in my personal view, to be the things we need to have in order to smoothly change Old-School Dogfighting, which is, after all, what this thread is about.

edited 24th Feb '12 8:42:20 PM by girlyboy

That's my take on things, too, but I'm not sure if there's consensus to do that or not. Do we need a crowner?

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Sounds about right.

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What are some examples of things that would go in the "Space Is Air" trope, but not the "Dogfighting In Space" trope?

Or is it just that there are some examples of Dogfighting In Space that don't involve Space Is Air, so we need to keep them separate?

edited 26th Feb '12 9:47:01 PM by abk0100

The second part. Space Is Air/Fluid/Whatever (or Etherial Rudder) is a type of Acceptable Breaks from Reality similar to Space Friction: a way something moves that feels more familiar to the audience/creator as opposed to pure Newtonian movement which has a very odd look and feels weird until you get used to it. Technically, Space Friction would be a suptrope of Space Is Air.

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Space Friction is a property of Space Is an Ocean as well as Space Is Air, so it wouldn't be a subtrope, but it's definitely a related concept.

Things that would go under Space Is Air but not Space Dogfighting: banking into turns, changing orientation without using using maneuvering thrusters, firing their engines continually while traveling instead of doing a burn to set their course and then coasting... basically anything that makes sense for an airplane to do but not a spaceship.

Space Dogfighting would be a subtrope of both Space Is Air and Old-School Dogfighting.

edited 26th Feb '12 10:14:35 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

That sounds about right.

The important part of Space Is Air would be the way spacecraft are shown to manoeuvre. The important part of Space Dogfighting would be a particular approach to showing combat in space. The latter would be a sub-trope of the former, but I think distinct enough to be its own trope.

... And now I'm wondering whether the scene in Spaceballs where the Space Winnebago takes a sharp, rubber-burning turn in outer space can count as an exaggeration of Space Is Air...

I'm not set on making Space Dogfighting a subtrope of Space Is Air. Battlestar Galactica Reimagined tells me they can have Space Dogfighting without Space Is Air, even if they're not banking around.

Fight smart, not fair.

That's a fair point... I suppose Space Dogfighting could be defined more broadly as, say, "two or more Space Fighters engaging in dramatic close-range combat with lots of fast-paced action and exciting manoeuvres, often inspired by WWII-style aerial combat, and usually — but not always — making use of Space Is Air". I think that last part is still common enough to be note-worthy, even if it's not always the case. "Space Is Air" would then be listed as a "related" trope, and Old-School Dogfighting would be the Super-Trope.

edited 28th Feb '12 12:09:22 AM by girlyboy

Yes, it's definitely worth a mention as it's a very common related trope in use at the same time. Overall, that sounds right.

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The existence of Space Fighters at all requires the presence of Space Is Air to at least some extent. There are a lot of technical reasons for it, but the short version is that atmospheric fighters exist in order to allow you to attack targets over the horizon, where you can't see them (and thus can't attack them) directly. In space, there is no horizon, so there's no need for space fighters, so The Battlestar would be better off just carrying more/bigger guns and armor instead of carting Space Fighters around. Now, "Space Fighter" in the sense of "one-manned short-range space combat craft" may or may not make sense, especially if it's based on a stationary post like a moon base or a space station, but when they're used analogously to atmospheric fighters, they definitely don't.

tldr; regardless of whether or not they obey Newtonian physics, a Space Fighter as part of the Standard Sci-Fi Fleet is an example of Space Is Air.

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