Some research...

[emotepix]

Greetings, fellow MeshMakers...

Chris Ross Leong, film maker, here.

Doing some research into space fighters and dogfights for a feature I"m prepping now, and apart from these titles:

Wing Commander
BG
SAB
parts of Star Wars
the Last Starfighter

the rest of them seem to use spacecraft solely as a means to get people either to the Palmdale desert (or similar) or San Francisco in the 60s.

Other 'pure' in-craft sci fi movies that I've not covered here? I'm mainly looking for pilot to pilot stuff.

Thanks!
Cheers
Chris

[Chanur]

You forgot "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" :D

[emotepix]

Chanur
That was the Glenn Larson TV series you're referring to? Sorry, I"m originally from the UK and missed that one entirely. Wasn't that a spinoff from Larson's original BSG?
Any particular episodes stand out?

[Sanderlee]

Chanur
That was the Glenn Larson TV series you're referring to? Sorry, I"m originally from the UK and missed that one entirely. Wasn't that a spinoff from Larson's original BSG?
Any particular episodes stand out?

Yes it was another of the many Glenn Larson series as I recall, but it was unrelated to BSG. It was it's own beast, based on a comic strip and series of movie cliff-hangers from the 1950s (as I recall). Alas, like the original Galactica, Buck Rogers suffers from "excessive overuse of stock footage syndrome."

Other good fighter vs. fighter:

Babylon 5 - good examples of fighter vs. fighter AND fighters in a Capital Ship heavy environment.

Several of the Dominion War sequences in Deep Space 9 had starships behaving like fighters (esp. re: Klingon Birds of Prey, Jem'hadar ships, and actual Federation fighters in a few scenes).

Andromeda had a couple of fighter-based episodes ("Slipfighter: The Dogs of War" as one example) but it too was mostly capital ship based.

Macross Plus and Macross Zero anime series had some pretty spectacular dogfights, in and out of atmosphere (in, mostly ... but still worth watching, especially for the "surviving in a seriously over-gunned universe" issues).

[emotepix]

Thanks! Any more?

[amaysingstories]

Chris,

On that topic, you may want to take a different tack. Space fighters are done all over the place, but for the most part are simply aerial dogfights moved to a different location, and they don't move anything like actual vehicles in space. Shows that at least made an attempt were the new BSG, Space: Above and Beyond (you can get the whole series on DVD now for cheap), and Babylon 5. Of those, B5 was the most realistic.

True realism would eschew fighters, though. A fighter is a small, underpowered, badly defended space vessel with a limited armament. It makes sense in an environment where a large vessel is protected/blocked by a horizon. There, you can send your weapons out over the horizon to make the attack, while protecting your High Value Unit from harm. The reason we put pilots in the weapons platforms is that our command and control of the units over the horizon is limited, but this gap is closing every day.

In space, where there is no horizon (for the most part), and command and control is limited only by a lightspeed lag and whatever lag is imparted by your information processing loop, a fighter makes little sense. Your man is the soft, squishable limit. It honestly makes more sense to use capital ships and long-range missile duels, with lightspeed and sub-lightspeed direct fire weapons for close-range defense.

The only problem with this is the dramatic one. A fighter closing in on an enemy is a more visceral experience than a long range duel with multiple warhead missiles, though I think I do a fairly good job with it in my novel-in-progress, A Sword Into Darkness, snippets of which are available on this very site (which you have already seen of course).

- Tom Mays