I also enjoyed Niven/Pournelle's descriptions in Mote in God's Eye - to paraphrase, space combat is incredibly boring except for brief flashes of terror.
I really liked Lucas' treatment of space combat with capital ships in Episode III. You line up next to each other and start blasting, just like they did back in the good old days of pirates on wooden sailing ships. Of course this is incredibly stupid and immensely destructive to both ships but it makes for awesome explosions.
But I think doing this within range of a planet's gravity well isn't too intelligent. Lose power and down you go.
I always appreciated the space battles in the X-Wing series of computer games. That's the way I see it, large capital ships with single-man fighters buzzing around them. But since we have semi-automated drones with human pilots on the other side of the world with a satellite link, I would have to assume those single-man fighters would be unmanned.
But Niven/Pournelle's idea of space combat is most likely what we would get.
