![]() ![]() While I'm assuming that your mods can take into account the myriad of different propellant combinations, the game fundamentally has to leave out what makes stuff work. While the base game's atmospheric model and re-entry heating could certainly be modified to be more realistic, the experience is ultimately not going to hold up to most serious simulations and actual missions. But it still misses out on some n-body effects, like Lagrangian points.Īerodynamics is a completely different beast, mostly because it's inherently much more complex than orbital mechanics. Kerbal Space Program uses 2-body patched conics to approximate orbits, which is what we care about in most "practical" space-flight anyway. If we assume that your proposed mods take care of oddly sized planets and orbits, the orbital part isn't very far off. With those general considerations out of the way, the game is indeed a physics simulator, simulating:Īs you have noted, the base game takes quite some liberties with all of those. Can a computer program easily estimate scientific value of space activity? Geopolitics? What stuff costs and what you can get a budget for? (people often fail spectacularly predicting all of those, even in real life). A game-like simulator will have trouble quantifying many of the underlying motivations. Ultimately, it's the goal that shapes what missions end up looking like. Real world space travel has many different motivations, like for instance: Should be noted however that KSP was never meant to be a 'true to life' simulation, just a physics simulation.if you take that lil fact plus that this game is built on Unity i think KSP does a very good job at what it set out to do (physics-wise that is).For all simulators, the core question is: What is it trying to simulate? Will be interesting how much of FAR mod is in next update hehehe On top of this there is the atmosphere.Ive had thinner syrup on my pancakes =/ ![]() This gives rise to a cheat where you can stop your rotation and lock in place even without the proper SAS module by just going into time warp for an instant and coming back out of it. so here's the parameters of the ellipse that it will be following, and where it will be on that ellipse at any given time T.) The rest of the vessel information is fully unloaded and removed from memory until you go back to it, at which point the game reloads and rebuilds it all, to recreate the full vessel.)ģ: Because of how (2) above was implemented, whenever you time warp ahead, your vessel loses all its rotational velocity and just freezes in one orientation. When you leave a vessel and go look somewhere else, it says 'okay, the vessel's current position is this and current velocity is that. For everything farther away than that, they just pre-calculated a time-parameterized ellipse equation from the vessels' last known full-simulation speed and poistion, and put the vessel on that math line. that density really wouldn't be possible in the first place.Ģ: To save on how much math the CPU has to do, to make it run well on people's home computers and not require a supercomputer to run the simulation, they only *really* run the full blown simulation on whichever vessels are closest to the camera (within 2.5km usually). So while the orbital mechanics responds to that density with correct math. ![]() even if Kerbin was made entirely of a heavy element like Uranium it still wouldn't be that dense. until you run some calculations and realize that to do this they had to make the planet out of such a super dense material that chemistry says "no". Where the realism breaks down a bit is in three ways:ġ: They decided to make Kerbin smaller than Earth but give it the same gravitational pull at it's surface (9.802 m/s^2), purely for faster gameplay (so it takes less time to get to orbit, but still using correct gravitational physics). you can't have Lagrange points because only the current body you're nearest to is influencing your movement). It has correct orbital mechanics for two-body problems but not 3-body and up (i.e. ![]()
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