Space Dogfight/Sandbox

A Space Dogfight is when spacecraft (usually Space Fighters, for obvious reasons) engage in Old School Dogfighting. This generally means that Space Is Air, but it may occur even in works that are otherwise Newtonian physics friendly, just because dogfights are that cool. While most of the reasons why this is unrealistic are covered under Space Is Air, dogfighting in space adds another wrinkle; in space, there's nothing to keep the lead craft (the one about to be shot at) from spinning around so that it's travelling backwards and using its Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon on its pursuer. If this sort of maneuver does occur, expect it to be treated as evidence that the character who did it has Improbable Piloting Skills.

See also Old School Dogfighting, Space Is Air, Space Fighter, and Space Battle.

Anime

 * Super Dimension Fortress Macross uses this in conjunction with lots and lots of missiles. The signature stylized depiction of close-ranged dogfights known as the "Itano Circus", named for director Ichiro Itano.
 * The rest of the series, including Macross Plus, Macross 7, Macross Zero and Macross Frontier use it as well.
 * Macross Frontier in particular plays with the trope. It's played mostly straight, but averted with, which behave very much like they're in space, changing direction with sharp zigs and zags. In addition, earlier in the series, Brera dodges a gun burst from Alto by zagging sideways in atmosphere, actually inverting the trope.
 * Cowboy Bebop uses non-Newtonian physics during space dogfights, though it generally shows space travel correctly otherwise. It also has some in-atmosphere Old School Dogfighting, though it's questionable if the planets in question (mostly Mars an several terraformed moons) would have thick enough atmospheres to allow it, possibly putting that in the realm of not-quite-space dogfighting as well.
 * Fighters in Space Battleship Yamato operate with exactly identical tactics to World War II carrier aircraft, including dive bombers and torpedo bombers.

Film

 * The Lost in Space movie opened with the classic space dogfight.
 * Star Wars uses this in all six films; George Lucas deliberately used imagery from World War II movies for the space fight sequences (such as The Dam Busters for the attack on the Death Star at the end of A New Hope -- it even shares some dialogue!)
 * The Last Starfighter; though a better example than most in that it wasn't a straight Cool Plane analogue, it still relied on human reflexes, vision, and manual aiming methods.

Literature

 * Played with in Tomorrow War by Alexander Zorich: there are aerospace fighters, they have both missiles and cannons, but engage other fighters at ranges longer than in a classical dogfight. They attack big ships that aren't severely damaged only from several megameters, with missiles, since Space Navy is mostly modern navy In Space, only with better radars and laser CIWS. Pilots use biostimulant to improve their acceleration tolerance to a higher performance level.
 * An unusual example of written SF playing this trope straight is Barry Longyear's novella Enemy Mine, a survival story about two marooned space-fighter pilots, which was later made into a film.
 * Like the films, there's plenty of space dogfighting in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The X Wing Series, in particular, revolves around it.
 * The novelizations of the Robotech series address this problem by noting that the Veritech fighters were partially controlled by the pilot's thoughts. Since the pilots were accustomed to flying in the atmosphere, that translated to similar flying patterns in space. Whether that makes it better or worse, though...
 * Addressed in The Lost Fleet series - Fast Attack Craft (fighters) aren't even mentioned until the sixth book. Their usage is discussed, with major characters noting their use is characteristic of someone more familiar with atmospheric combat and still thinking in those terms. As always, the physics of the matter are also brought up; unable to carry the weaponry of larger ships, they are dependent upon carrier ships and are slower and less maneuverable than larger ships due to poor mass-to-thrust ratios. Their sole advantage over larger ships is their small size, which makes them difficult to target. This advantage is more than offset by their poor speed and maneuverability in relativistic combat - they are so slow by comparison to larger ships that they are incapable of turning themselves around in a timely fashion to make a second attack pass.
 * In the Gaunt's Ghosts spinoff Double Eagle, hyper advanced space fighters with vectored thrust engines and laser cannons are still mixing it up WWII style.

Live Action TV

 * Zig Zagged Trope in Star Trek, which generally lacks both Space Fighters and Fixed Forward Facing Weapons. As time has gone on (and budgets have gone up), though, some entries in the franchise have started to play it straight. Especially visible in Deep Space Nine and The Next Generation, where fleet battles and any scenes featuring the Defiant show lots of space dogfighting.
 * Farscape opens with John getting shot into the middle of a space dogfight.
 * Stargate SG-1 has a few, and every race has at least one vehicle useful in a dogfight (F-302s, Death Gliders, Puddle Jumpers, Wraith Darts etc).
 * Justified Trope and mildly Averted Trope in the new Battlestar Galactica Classic -- Cylon ECM is good enough to make guided missiles useless, making it necessary to get up close and personal. Also worth noting that the original Battlestar Galactica played this trope straight nearly every episode.
 * Pretty much used in every episode of the Buck Rogers TV series.
 * Space: Above and Beyond. The Human SA-43 "Hammerhead" fighters had guns infront and behind so they could shoot at targets that wasn't in front of them.
 * The interceptors in UFO use stand-off missiles, though they appear to be unguided. The combat in general draws very much from popular Battle of Britain images: Moonbase is the beleaguered sector airfield and SID (Space Intruder Detector) the RDF radar. Calmly-speaking young women (the WAAF's) vector in Interceptors (Spitfires) against the anonymous alien invaders (German bombers). But given that the Moon takes 27.322 days to orbit the Earth, one wonders why the aliens don't just attack when Moonbase is on the opposite side of their target.
 * Doctor Who came up with an example of this trope taken to its extreme - through some technobabble upgrades, 1940's Spitfires take on a Dalek ship in orbit.

Tabletop Games

 * Played straight, then averted in BattleTech. Under the standard rules, aerospace fighters function much the same in either space or atmosphere -- there are some practical differences between the environments, but the basic maneuvers and tactics are still the same. Cue the advanced rules (found in the Strategic Operations volume in the current incarnation of the rule set), though, and suddenly fighters in space can use their maneuvering thrusters to spin in mid-flight in ways that they never could in mid-air. (This doesn't change their heading, mind, just their facing -- but it still effectively turns them into fast-moving turrets.)
 * This trope is the entire purpose of the Warhammer40000-derived game Aeronautica Imperialis.

Video Games

 * The Evochron series allows for old-school dogfighting when the Inertial Dampening System is active, which fires your vernier thrusters automatically to fly you in a straight line. Using it in a dogfight is basically a death sentence though, as players who take advantage of the benefits of the game's Newtonian physics will be boosting past you backwards at 5 times the IDS's max speed. Dogfights in planets play this straight though, as players must maintain a constant forward speed to generate lift. If the player tries to fly without the IDS active, he'll likely plummet to the ground.
 * Elite for the 8-bit BBC Micro was the original space-borne point of view shooter/trader game, with later versions for other computers. The original version used this trope. Some of later versions tried to have more realistic physics, but this made for very poor game play.
 * Played with in Frontier's versions of Elite -- Newtonian physics, more or less sensible effective weapon ranges but AI is rather simple, so you still get to see some bot nearly ramming you, and instruments for long-range fight (even zoom) are not implemented, turning this into sort of Pixel Hunt.
 * Mass Effect justifies it with the use of the local Phlebotinum, mass effect fields. Fighters are used in fleet battles to attack enemy capital ships, and interceptors are used to shoot down enemy fighters. Of course, since Mass Effect is a Third-Person Shooter, all of this is part of the setting background rather than the gameplay.
 * The Wing Commander games employ most of this trope. The in-game flight mechanics of the series are not reminiscent of airplanes (they yaw instead of bank when they turn, for one), but they do enforce Space Friction and Chasing Your Tail. What's more, the flight mechanics do not change when fighting in a planet's atmosphere, making it seem more like Wing Commander has its own bizarre rules of reality for both air and space.
 * The space shooter Free Space 2 has "World War I-style dogfighting" written on the box as a feature.
 * The original Descent series inverts this, as player ships and most enemies completely ignore gravity even though it takes place mostly in environments that would have at least some gravity (there is Space Friction where there shouldn't be, however). Ships have no need to maintain forward velocity and can hover or accelerate freely in any direction, making them more akin to gunships than fighters, and as such, "dogfighting" in open areas includes completely different maneuvers.
 * In Homeworld, strike craft based on the fighter chassis make strafing runs against their targets, whereas other craft will simply fly into weapons range and unload. Unlike this trope, however, they tend to maneuver by doing 180 degree turns and returning on the same path to their target.
 * In Ace Online, while ridiculously high-altitude and long-range missile combat is possible, war situations tend to move towards close-range combat for numerous reasons involving the game's Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors.
 * The X-Universe games, like pretty much everything set in space, heavily invokes this trope but X3: Reunion is a particularly egregious offender. Most medium to heavy missiles are not only easily shot down by guns, but are actually slower than their intended targets.
 * X Wing, TIE Fighter and the rest of the series, naturally. It's notable in that not only are they trying to emulate the examples set in the film, but they are as much a Spiritual Successor to Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe as much as they are Star Wars licensed games.
 * Star Fox is built on this trope, which shouldn't be surprising since the ships used are basically just the X-wings from Star Wars. Levels take place in open space, near the ground, or even near the surface of a sun, but the handling is always exactly the same.