You do realize that "more maneuverable" does not equate to pitch and yaw rate, correct? In a [next best thing to] frictionless environment, maneuverability is limited to acceleration rates. Granted, an unmanned craft could theoretically withstand higher G forces, things still tend to break.
Of course it does! Any change in ship direction has consequences to the pilot. Barrel rolls equate to a centrifugal force that may be equal to several times what a human's body can tolerate without catastrophic injury to the blood vessels in the head and feet of the poor pilot. Remember, the pilot's blood and internal organs will tend to continue to travel in one direction while the ship pitches, yaws or accelerates in another. Do this too abruptly, and the human body will definitely experience trauma.
This isn't a new concept. Pilots of modern combat aircraft cannot survive the maneuvers that their aircraft could do quite easily. Avionics are programmed to actually limit the capabilities of the aircraft to protect the pilots from themselves. Thus we have force feedback on the controls of the fighters.
I think you misunderstood what Scotty was saying.
Maneuverability in an airplane is a two fold thing. You have elevators that control the angle of attack vertically, rudders that control angle of attack horizontally and elevators that controls the attitude of the ship around it's longitudinal axis.
However, as far as maneuverability goes, the most important term for any combat airplane is actually defined by one factor: The maximum sustainable amount of lift.
This may sound counterintuitive, but all aircraft turn by using lift and thrust. They change their attitude with control surfaces, but the turn rate of the aircraft is entirely dictated by the amount of lift that it produces. When an aircraft rolls left or right, the lift force from wings is still headed "upwards" in relation to airplane - and now the vector is pointing to one side of the plane. So it has one component pulling the plane up and one component pulling the plane sideways.
The sideways force acts as a centripetal force and the airplane ends up in a circular motion known as "turn". Meanwhile, since part of the lift is now used to maintain lift, the airplane begins to lose altitude if nothing is done to correct the situation. Normally this is done by increasing angle of attack, which increases the total amount of lift so that the downward component is equal to airplane's weight and the plane won't descend during the turn.
Now, the amount of centripetal force generates centripetal acceleration which is known as the g-force in the turn. It's also obvious that when angle of attack is increased further, the centripetal force increases, forcing the aircraft on a smaller turn radius. Typically, each aircraft has it's own "sweet spot" or maximum cornering velocity where pulling back the stick will result in the largest amount of lift while the airplane's nose also pitches up at fastest rate. This is the velocity where the airplane turns the best - for a brief period of time. This is used as a break turn and it's typically employed to get inside a missile's - or a pursuing plane's - turn radius in an attempt to escape destruction.
However, increasing angle of attack is a dramatically energy-consuming maneuver since it increases the drag of the airplane greatly. As a result, more thrust is needed to maintain airspeed. Terms like maximum sustained turn rate come into play; an optimal turn rate at which the airplane's engines can produce enough thrust to counter the additional drag and maintain that airspeed. This is the single most important aspect of an airplane's maneuverability and comes into play especially in a sustained close range dogfight.
Now that we have established the aviation terminology for maneuverability, let's take a look at the situation where there's no atmosphere.
We soon notice that pitch, roll and yaw changes do nothing to your vector. You're just spinning around your center of gravity while going in the exact same direction as before. Sure, you can knock yourself out by spinning too hard but as you're going in a straight line at constant velocity, you'll be easy target to anything hostile, whether you're conscious or not. Since there's no lift to align towards the direction you want to turn to, you have to do something different.
In order to actually change your vector, course, travel direction or whatever you wanna call it, you need to fire your thrusters into the direction opposite from where you want to go. Also, ideally you should keep your thrust vector directed towards the desired center of turn for the duration of the turn. If you have static main thrusters, you need to turn your ship so that it is flying "sideways", and then engage full thrust and turn the ship slowly so that the heading of the ship is pointing towards that imaginary spot in space that you are looping around, much like a stone in a sling.
When you cut the thrusters, your ship will continue from the circular motion tangentually to the direction you want to be going to.
And much like in aviation, your ship's ability to produce thrust (actually, thrust to mass ratio, or acceleration in other words) is essentially the defining factor when measuring maneuverability in space. Certainly, pitch roll and yaw rates have their importance, but it is much easier to make a pivot ball space ship than one that can produce a lot of acceleration for a long time; propellant increases ship's weight significantly, so we have a catch-22 or something; you can prolong the operational combat time of a space ship by increasing propellant load, but if you increase the mass too much, the ship's turn rate suffers and it will die. But if you reduce the amount of propellant, the ship might run out of thrust during the fight and die...
Also, the reason why removing pilot increases possible maneuverability is, first and foremost, the pilot's health which is no longer the limiting factor in acceleration. Machines can take a lot more acceleration than human body can - in a sustained turn. Sure, humans can survive +100G collisions if no actual injury happens (refer to the
rocket sled experiments) but in a sustained turn machines can function longer and better.
Secondly, performance is improved by removal of weight - pilot weight, controls, life support, cockpit structure, seat, cup holders and all the pilot's equipment for emergencies. Reduced mass means the acceleration is improved, which means life and death in space combat.
NGTM-1R: that only works at ranges where the laser beam takes some time beyond nanoseconds to reach the target. Even a lightmicrosecond might be sufficient, but that's a long distance still... and evading like that consumes propellant like there's no tomorrow.
Also, regarding this:
Lasers are lousy weapons, too easily defeated by simple means. A reflective surface almost completely mitigates the damage done by a direct hit, and you still have to aim the thing to hit a small moving target hundreds or thousands of meters away. Try to paint a 150cm moving target from 100 meters away with a laser pointer sometime and see how hard it would be to evade that sort of weapon.
Obviously, you have missed something...Sure, as infantry weapons they would be massively impractical. For other purposes... they have potential.
Also, barrel roll is just a reference to Star Fox games where Barrel Roll is some sort of super move. Kinda like Mario when he's eaten the Star. It's not even a real barrel roll, just a rapid roll... immortalized by a hare shouting you to DO A BARREL ROLL DO A BARREL ROLL DO A BARREL ROLL all the goddamn time.
At the velocities I can imagine in a space dogfight, even re-orienting the human body quickly enough would result in injury.
Linear velocity has no effect on angular velocity. And human body can tolerate high angular velocities quite a bit better than linear acceleration, mainly because the dimensions of a human body are at average maximum about one metre from center of gravity.
Sure, it's disorienting as hell but doesn't actually damage a human being until the spin rates are rather insane.
