Reddit reviews In Pursuit: A Pilot's Guide to Online Air Combat

Try not to worry about it too much. There are plenty of resources to learn this stuff. :)

Here's my list:

• Art of the Kill | It's a little dated, but there's still some really good information here.
  
• Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering | This is the book to learn from. Fantastic information here.
  
• In Pursuit | I personally also liked this book on the subject. However, it's important to note that it focuses on WW2 war birds and there are a few important differences between WW2 air combat and modern air combat.
  
• Stick and Rudder | This isn't really a book on air combat so much as a book that teaches the basics of flying. There's some dated, and in some cases, supposedly outright wrong information, but it's very often sited as a great introduction to energy efficient, coordinated flight.
  
  Edit: Some additional resources of varying quality.
  
  
• Offensive Tactics Against Enemy Fighters in World War 2
  
• Pilot Training youtube channel
  
• WarBirds of World War II : Fighter Tactics 101
  
• Ape of the Year's Combat Moves/Tutorials playlist
  
• Grmlz War-Thunder Maneuver Guides

Anyone who's even spent 30 minutes reading, watching, or playing with fighter-on-fighter combat will know the one golden rule:

Speed is Life.

This will apply to Star Citizen considering its direction of portrayal of space combat. A slow target is a dead target. A fast, dynamic target is a hard target to hit.

Slowing down to make a tail overshoot is something any half-assed pilot will not do if he wants to live, and is something only the foolhardy, insane, or stupid will do.

I've gotten a LOT of kills in WT and DCS using the high yo-yo and the defensive vertical spiral to force a good lag displacement roll that gave me a good deflection shot on a 70 degree intercept. A lot of it is situational, working against common mistakes or tendencies of the community as a whole. Things like "Most people that have a center stick will almost always to a hard right roll when engaged from behind or how most people forget to take throttle out and put it back in in certain lead pursuit scenarios or just realizing a dude isn't using any rudder so you and force them to get slower, faster so they run out of energy and have to start diving.

​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_fighter_maneuvers

​

The wiki article isn't perfect, but it has enough info to be a good starting point. Some great reference material exists in a lot of places, from old game manuals (Jane's Advanced Tactical Fighters and Aces over Europe actually had amazingly detailed guides in them for a lot of intermediate maneuvers) and some books specifically on virtual aerial combat too, https://www.amazon.com/dp/9197607703/?coliid=IV5773AQFMR3N&colid=389HLPCN1YO5A&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

​

Hell, when I was a camp counselor at Aviation Challenge for a few months while doing some post-grad work the spiral bound book we gave the 12-18 year olds was actually better than some of the stuff the Navy was giving guys in the intermediate jet trainers as far as useful maneuvering information in a broad sense.