https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7892462
For the upcoming Elite: Dangerous, the maker is drawing as much as possible from current astronomy.
That said, I do believe Elite: Dangerous does allow you to adopt an advanced mode that might be closer to what you are expecting.
Using inertia and rotating was the only way to "strafe" along a cap ship, and much more efficient at destroying turrets than your usual back and forth fire-and-forget missile/torpedo/guns-blazing runs typical of post X-Wing/TIE Fighter space operas.
Also you could just turn around and shoot whoever is behind you (except they've got a time advantage since suddenly you're moving on a straight line and by the time you've got them on sight you're dead). An incredibly useful strategy was to just pivot then throw in the after burner for dramatic direction changes in an attempt to outmaneuver your opponent.
I always thought this game landed a good balance between fun and realism, with a suspension-of-disbelief-compatible in-story explanation that you're usually in computer assisted mode that simulates atmospheric flight behavior because otherwise dogfights are humanly impossible to manage.
To be it seems awfully insulting that players wouldn't understand that a ship doesn't necessarily go where it's pointing, which is really what it comes down to.
That said Elite: Dangerous regular flight physics are still Newtonian, even more so than I-War series as it features rigid body dynamics and not a point mass, but the ships have very strong maneuvering thrusters a flight control system computer to counteract the skidding and keep it within a certain speed limit, but you can partially turn it off.
See videos below:
http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ#W...
You can't say you follow some rules and then break them when you choose to and then say your game is Newtonian. Because then every game having player moving in the world is.
Here are the facts. When turning you keep you velocity, which implies magical thrusters that can change power drastically when needed to do so. But why not use that power all the time and not only when turning? Doesn't make any sense. And there is a maximum speed limit. How does that follow the Newtonian laws?
Have you played Frontier (Elite 2) at all? That seems to be what you're after. Much as I loved that game, the combat was awful. It came down to judging when to switch your autopilot on and off, because there was no way you could manually track your enemy as you passed by at 5000kph.
I think space combat in reality would be 99% dull, 1% mind blowing too fast to react insanity, because the firing windows would be so narrow before just being missiles fired back and forth, with point defences having ages to pick down the enemy munitions.
Realistically speaking. Lasers would lead to mirrored ships. Particle beams would likely lead to the magnetic shields proposed for protection against the solar wind. Explosives will be highly inefficient in a vacuum, so they'd only be implemented like in current bunker busters. So we're talking kinetic impact weapons.
I've given this a lot of thought recently, working on my own hard sci-fi space game :)
I don't think mirrors are a good protection against high powered lasers. I've done some reading around the Internet and the consensus was that even if the mirror is absolutely flawless and perfectly clean, it's only a matter of time before a laser punches through it. The best defense against laser weapons turns out to be bad weather, which is hard to find in outer space. (Fighting inside a nebula might help?)
I think beam weapons will be devastatingly effective, once ships have enough power behind them, leading to battles at extreme ranges (light seconds to light minutes), where evasive manuevers can be somewhat effective.
That's my take on it, from reading various Q&A's on the net and thinking a lot about how space battles would probably really work in the near future. It's great fun to think about.
Maybe some kind of gas or mirrored chaff as a countermeasure?
On the upside it's not an atmospheric flight model in Elite. You can orient yourself freely if you're not thrusting, and indeed 'flying backwards' by getting some thrust going and then doing a 180 so you can fire at the enemy with your forward-facing weapons is a pretty essential tactic.
You mostly get the sort of gravity effects you're describing in the fast-traveling "supercruise" mode, where the proximity of a large mass severely slows you down. The effect is handy for slowing to approach speed close to stations, since they're generally close to a planet or a moon.