In one of the episode commentaries ( the one where Kara crash lands on that moon/planet I think - Cervaise would know the episode number 
) they mention that one of the things they had to cut ( or had wanted to add, but didn’t ) was an explanation of the Viper’s design as a dual-use space and atmospheric strike-fighter.
Yeah, the Vipers strike me as a compromise, having thrusters for space maneuvering, minimal control surfaces for atmospheric flight (that said, it appears that realizing that a fighter designed to be capable of space combat would suffer against a dedicated air maneuverer, the Colonials made the Viper to be an ass-hauler ala the F-14 rather than an angle-fighter ala the F-16. Lots of big engines, slender profile, minimal wings. I wouldn’t want to have to use this thing for low-altitude flying if I had the choice.
Incidentally, has anyone noticed how the Viper MkVI’s look kinda like F-16s from certain angles?
As for the Starfuries from Babylon 5 (more properly refered to as Aurora Starfuries), they do tend to do lots of straight-angle flying, but once given a good reason to, they can flip, spin, reverse, climb and drop, and do all sorts of dizzying acrobatic manevuers. The Thunderbolt Starfuries, introduced later in the show, are compromise designs, featuring a more aerodynamic fuselage and folding wings. While they’re not as fast or maneuverable as the Starfuries, they appear to be more heavily armed and have shark teeth painted on the nose, which as we all know gives any aircraft +10 to initiative due to their highly intimidating nature.
And as for IR guided weapons, yeah, cutting the engines might help to loose them, but in space, that leaves you traveling in a straight-line path. If you could include some kind of isolated (ie: no way to be hacked into remotely) guidance system that could plot ballistics predictions for those situations, you might have a fair chance of the missile being able to plot an intercept to where the other fighter will be in a second or two.
Meh. Compressed air jets along the ship. Straight line with a missle after you? Puff. You’re now a few meters to the left and increasing your distance from that path every moment.
-Joe
[geek mode] A hundred years ago, I worked at General Dynamics in the early days of the F-16 program. The plane had an automatic yaw adjustment for when the gun was fired. I estimated that the 30mm Gatling gun, firing at something like 600 rounds per minute, (I forget the projectile weight) had about 15,000 pounds of kick. Dig up the specs on Galactica’s weaponry and a similar calculation could be done. [/geek mode]
[uber geek mode] The F16 doesn’t have a 30mm cannon. It has a 20mm cannon. The firing rate is closer to 6,000 rpm than 600. Though I have read somewhere that the firing rates on some of the Vulcan guns is selectable, but not, I think, as low as 600.
The A-10 has the 30mm cannon. [/uber geek mode]
Oh yeah, according to Wikpedia, it fires a 3.5 oz. projectile at about 3400 ft/sec. at 6000 rounds per minute.
Ha!
Who’s the Uber-Galactica-Geek, now?
Wait a minute…is this a good thing?
As a matter of fact, I remember reading in a Tom Clancy nonfiction book that the early F-16 pilots nicknamed their planes “Vipers,” after the original Galactica series!
Pffft. Y’all call yourselves fans of the show?
[uber-duper geekmode with taped-up glasses]This is specifically addressed in the episode where Starbuck gets lost on some far-flung planet. The fighter pilots are ordered to commence a mark-one eyeball search for her - flying low and slow through an atmosphere - while the XO complains that these maneuvers will simultaneously consume too much valuable fuel and expose the pilots to unnecessary risks since the Vipers were never intended to fly slow in an atmosphere.[/geekmode]
I have no trouble with the control surfaces on the Vipers. I guess always assumed that they were intended for both space and atmospheric use, given that we see pics of them parked on planetside tarmacs and whatnot.
Haven’t we seen the fighters do this in BSG? I’m thinking of the early Pegasus eps where the fighters from either Battlestar go toe-to-toe - there’s lots of dizzying acrobatics and reversals and whatnot as each pilot jockeys for a firing solution. I’m sure there’s plenty more. You get quite a few camera shots from the pilot’s perspective, where the nose RCS jets fire during maneuvers.
Another example from the Resurrection Ship episode: the Vipers are “flying” “sideways” (I’m sure there’s a more technical term like a “lateral attitude fly by” or something) while they point their guns at the target.
As for the apparent banking maneuvers, that ties into another aspect of dramatized space combat that bugged me until I had an epiphany. The fighters are constantly thrusting. This seemed to me like an unconscionable waste of fuel, until I realized that the alternative is to sit in a nice predictable vector and wait to get shot. Okay, so they’re constantly accelerating, and also presumably jiggling the RCS thrusters, in order to minimize their fatalities. (That’s the epiphany part.)
So when you’re constantly thrusting, and then you suddenly need to take a sharp turn, I imagine it’s easier on the pilot and the vehicle frame to maintain the thrust while firing the nose RCS to reorient you just past the angle you want to take, rather than about-face-decelerate-rotate-thrust-go. Ok, so the first method puts you into a wicked yaw maneuver, but space is big and if you point your nose past the angle you want to go, you’ll cancel some of that old velocity.
Heh. Oh hell yes.
As God is my witness, my first spaceship will be an Earth Alliance Thunderbolt. 
BTW, for those of you unaware, if you have UHD as part of a cable or satellite HD package, you can watch the show in HD.
Ack. Like I said, it was about 100 years ago.
We’ve seen Vipers do a limited version of this. With Vipers, the primary tactic seems to be to go fast and be hard to hit. With Starfuries, the primary tactic is to continue to engage the enemy regardless of your heading. Starfuries can also do a neat trick that Vipers can’t do: Accelerate backwards. We’ve seen battles where an enemy ship was chasing a Starfury, which was firing back at them and still boosting away (since their engines can thrust forward and back equally well, while a Viper seems to primarily be designed to go “forward” (whichever direction the Viper happens to be pointing).
Vipers are what I think are called “Power Fighters”, who derive their main advantage from raw engine power. In atmospheric terms, this means a fighter that can haul ass, climb like a frightenned squirrel and dive like a greased dolphin. Starfuries are Angle Fighters. Not necessarily the fastest fighters out there, but they can maneuver like coked up ferrets, and use that ability to get firing solutions on their opponents.
In the Wing Commander games, this was called an “Inertial Slide” or an “Auto Slide” depending on the ship you were flying and which game you were in. IIRC, Wing Commander 3 and Wing Commander 4, whose engines didn’t model inertia, only the scout fighter and the superfighter (the Arrow and the Excalibre) could slide, but in WC1,2, Prophecy and Secret Ops all the fighters could slide to different degrees depending on the running start you got (the fighters experienced drag in space because they all had out big magnetic “scoops” to collect bits of hydrogen in space that their engines would burn, which meant that they needed constant thrust to keep going forward in space unless they closed the scoops, in which case they’d take off like rockets, at speeds entirely too fast for safe engagements with anything.
The missile can always turn sharper than you.
You know what? No one has ever really gotten space combat right. The problem is that the ships are usually in orbit. You can’t chase another ship in orbit like you’re chasing it through the atmosphere because if you accelerate, you’ll go into a higher orbit.
Granted, but the point was to make a direction and/or speed change with engines shut down and without generating heat. So while it could make the turn, it loses track and doesn’t know to make the turn.
Actually, how long do you suppose the exhausts of a space fighter would be visible to infrared after cutting out the engines? From what I have heard, it’s remarkably difficult to cool things down in space, since without an atmosphere, you lose the ability to use convection or conduction to get rid of it.
What episode was that exactly, I’m sorry I missed it.
An early episode, where a liner returns bereft of passengers but loaded with nukes had the fleet in the background jumping out while the Galatica moved slowly (and gracefully) in between the two groups of ships to provide cover. Truely some of the best big-ship action on TV SF for ages. Or should that be yarns?
Resurrection Ship Part II, the third part of the Pegasus “trilogy”.
Ah yes, that would be the Hugo award-winning, first season first episode 33. 
You see the Galactica running interference for the rest of the fleet a bit more, early on. Notably in the miniseries, when the Colonial ships are navigating out of the storm around Ragnar Station, to where three Cylon Basestars are waiting for them: the big G comes out first, then turns to use her bulk to shield the fleet from the Cylons while the other ships jump out. It’s all done slow and ponderously, and that combined with the mind-blowing camera zooms, you really get a sense of scale.
(Geez, I think this is the same scene I was geeking out about earlier. I need to watch it again today, get my fix.)
IIRC, the Galactica’s always the last ship in the fleet to go FTL.
We were talking about evading a heat seeker without generating additional heat.
-Joe
Do you think that the engine cools instantaneously? Not to mention that if you are in a dogfight, it’s likely the other guy is CHASING you in which case shutting down your engine would be bad news.
Plus with a missle closing on you at mach 4, you generally have time to make about one turn and drop some flares and/or chaff.