OKAY OKAY OKAY so when I realized I was going to have to write a lot of space battles, I did two things. The first was put a sticky note on my laptop that said THE ENEMY'S GATE IS DOWN (which, ugh, fuck OSC into the SUN), to remind myself that direction is both 1. important, and 2. relative, and then I watched approximately a billion hours of bait ball footage in David Attenborough documentaries, which helped me write battles in which all directions are possible.
(A bait ball, btw, is when teams of predators work together to eat small fish like anchovies, sardines, or lantern fish. Tuna, seals, sharks, dolphins, etc corral the fish into a ball at the surface, and then pick them off. Sometimes rays get involved. It's like a toothy, toothy dance. Gannets and boobies dive down from above. They can go 20m down! And then sometimes a whale comes up from the deep and swallows the whole thing. It is my favourite part of any nature documentary.)
I consistently get compliments on the clarity of my space battles and my number one trick is just to stay in close third person, as tight as I can get it. I may know all or most of what's going on, but what I'm telling you is very much just what this one person is seeing and thinking -- I'm going there, I'm shooting this guy, I'm noticing that my squadmate said or did this.
(My number two trick is that I think of a lot of the action in terms of hockey games: this character is always three steps ahead of the action, that one hangs behind ready to cover an opening, and so forth. Probably any sportsball that ranges all over a field would work: basketball, soccer, etc. The point is to differentiate out how each character relates to the battlefield, which gives me a lot more ways to be specific instead of just "he's evading their shots and shooting back".)
