Space sim physics

Every couple of years a decent space fighter game/sim is released. But while games such as freelancer are overall well designed and fun to play for the action and story line, they have completely unrealistic physics. From a dogfighting perspective they're boring - Just full pull and fire when u see your target... Try that online in a decent fighter jet sim and you're pretty much dead against any decent opponent, those fights are based on faints, traps and gaining the energy advantage over your opponent.

There are some niche games that do attempt more physically accurate simulations (such as Starshatter), but as it turns out space combat with realistic traditional physics is, to me, even less interesting.

Space of course has no obvious potential wells/differences/axes, unless you count fighting close to planets/other gravity/mass concentrations. Space (usually) has no high enough concentrations of mass (think "air") that you may surf on. - So any form of dogfighting discussion with energy maneuvering  becomes pretty lame, long range guided weapons become death rays, impossible to evade without sufficient standoff/turn-and-run energy - meaning more boring fights.

Assume you're making a space sim which has something like bases/stations and capital ships/something man-made larger than a fighter. Let's also assume these structures have the ability to generate reasonably strong magnetic- or another type of field.... See where this is going? - There's your continously varying potential that your fighters may "fly/surf on". I'm not going to do all the math here but I bet a few well placed superconductors on your fighters would make for an interesting situation... All of a sudden it becomes important to maneuver through "dense space" to maximize turn rates ;).

Potential energy around planets/Earth is pretty boring after all, being (pretty much) spherically symmetric. All of a sudden, in a space game as mentioned before, you'd have capital ships battling with their own weapons as well as giving their fighters the best "sea" in between as possible. You'd need displays and sensors that give you a good idea of the potentials ahead and where to "sail/drift/surf" to maximize your performance and defeat your opponents.