Jaxom

Re: It's almost 5AM and I'm thinking about Space Combat
 
As I don't subscribe to DH, I cannot comment on Ben's article there but I can comment on the posts of Kraven Kor and bigdamnhero...
 
A lot of what is possible is going to depend on how you care to design your ships. The best approximation of this that I ever saw was the "Spacemaster" system from Iron Crown which was so detailed that it was practically unplayable. Even then it ignored some fundamental issues like where can you direct thrust. If you're going to attempt to correctly represent zero-G combat then thrust is the end-all-be-all of combat. All motion is inertial which means once you start moving you move that way always. To change that motion you have to point the ship (and hence the weapons) in such a way that you can provide new acceleration that counters the existing motion. This leads to all sorts of fun things like the ability to fly one direction and fire an alpha-strike salvo in any direction you want as long as you are not accelerating.
 
In short, tailing is a non-existent concept in zero-G combat because it implies that you cannot turn weapons to face a target while fleeing which is flat out wrong.
 
The only time this might matter is if you feared a boarding action but then you have a simple question to answer... If they try to fly through your front arc and board then either they are so heavily armored that you are not hurting them anyway or they are doing exactly what you want them to because it means crawling up and giving you point-blank fire all the way.
 
This leads to one of two reactions from players. Either they miss the romantic dogfight that they envision from old Errol Flynn movies and they hate it or they relish the chance to think and learn something new. If your players fall into the former category then forget that this is zero-G, adopt the dogfighting rules and go for cinematic (See Star Wars for a classic example). If your players fall into the latter category then good luck because I have never seen a system that has correctly reflected this and you're on your own. Be ready to do a lot of vector calculus and remember that you can solve everything exactly because it really is as simple as vector addition and maybe some polar coordinates if you want to deal with weapon arcs. (Which reminds me... I *really* need to write a simple program to handle that.)