You don't have a HUD, target indicator etc in outside [3rd person] view, but you have a much better awareness of your immediate surroundings, including your enemies / possible threats in that area.
No you don't. I cannot speak for planet-side, but for E

, you do not.
You might have a case with FoV, but that's actually independent of 3rd person (and there's a FoV setting right now in E

I don't see you complaining about, nor do I see you complaining about multi-monitors, head tracking, or VR which all effectively improve your FoV)
Yes, we do have a radar that shall help us with situational awareness from within the pit, and used correctly it does help.. But you, as a combat sim 'veteran', know as well as i do, that seeing things on radar doesn't compare to seeing things for real [as 'real' as seeing things on a computer screen can be, i guess].
Also, in order to look at the radar, you glance down and lose sight of whats actually behind your cockpit glass, so by gaining 'rough' situational awareness from the RDR, you give up possible knowledge about exact positions of enemies in your FoV from inside the pit..
Anytime you look somewhere you aren't looking somewhere else. 3rd person doesn't change that.
Indeed: 3rd person does a lot to distort locations. Though there's very little you can actually see that isn't already in front of you (it must be very close to get in your FoV), what you can see you can't necessarily tell the position of. Is that ship above and in front, direct above, or above and slightly behind?
Indeed: without the HUD, your situational awareness is heavily reduced. That's the reason I don't use 3rd person mode. It's harder.
Yea, some virtual aviators know how to use 'Pilot Vision' [1 eye constantly scanning the instruments], but the cluttered and messy radar in E.D doesn't make it easy on us.. Don't get me wrong, in theory the 360degree + vertical deviation indication is great stuff, and works as long as you have only 5 contacts popping up.. but when the radar gets cluttered with contacts upon contacts upon stellar bodies, the radar actually is of very little help, especially when trying to fly 'Pilots Vision'...
Same with real vision; which is made worse by its longer range.
Time has no influence on physics, i completely agree.. yet i believe that in the year 3301 technology will have advanced a bit from now, maybe even to a point at which E.D like space flight is possible [maybe not].
Why are you trying to find points to 'prove me wrong'? As it stands, "it's all fiction anyways"... So, um.. Yea, Sorry!
E

has little to no resemblance to actual space flight.
And if you think the issue is "advanced"... wow.
The shuttle orbits at 7,766 m/s. What's the top speed of a Cobra Mk III in real space again?
A Phoneix missile (one from the 60s, but one I know off the top of my head) has an effective range of about 200km. What's the effective range of a missile in E

again?
A current rail gun fires in excess of 3,000 m/s. Fired munitions can be course-correcting and have an engagement range of 56km. What's the rail gun in E

like?
Current tech could locate an ion drive at a distance of several AU. How far can E

sensors see ships?
E

then proceeds to ignore about every bit of physics you like, from how heat radiates to how radiation affects materials (hint: glass = bad), to what even the most efficient engines could manage for specific impulse.
The ships have crap-all in the way of proper interface. I'm serious: a 3rd-person view is more likely to be realistic than that window ever will be. The idea of massive engines in multiple directions, regardless of tech, is wasteful and would lose to a properly designed ship. There is not even a tip of the hat to the effects of acceleration (nor how to design a ship for it) despite the clear lack of artificial gravity. The list goes on and on.
I agree on the point saying E.D flies rather like IL2 than KSP, but that was the whole point of the game in the first place, wasn't it?
After all, fights in Star Wars look more like IL2 as well than they look like KSP [besides the space setting ofc]..
Funny you should bring that up. Lucas quite literally spliced together the entire Falcon-vs-Tie battle using footage from WWII movies. They then re-created it move-for-move with models.
*Citation needed* - really?
Tell me a proper combat sim that allows combat capable 3rd person view.. I'm sure you can't, because you stated yourself that you 'fight better from 1st person cockpit view' - which is very true in terms of lining up for the shots etc... There is a reason you don't have a pitch ladder in 3rd person in BMS or no crosshair in 3rd person in IL2 - as well as no instruments whatsoever.. the only flight sim i remember giving basic flight parameters while actively in 3rd person view is FSX, ad we all know that isn't a combat sim by any means [yes attempts have been made and there is good stuff available, but that's 3rd party content only]...
Freespace.