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It should be noted that Kerbal Space Program's orbital mechanics are not all that realistic, especially when you introduce the three-body problem. The world of
by jniedrauer 6y ago
It should be noted that Kerbal Space Program's orbital mechanics are not all that realistic, especially when you introduce the three-body problem. The world of KSP is also scaled down to about 1/10 of real life unless you use mods. A game like Orbiter really reinforces how much harder the problems are at real-life scale.
- Dylan16807 6y agoIt always struck me as weird that you have to mod KSP just to make gravity assists work accurately or Lagrange points work at all.
- wtallis 6y agoThe default physics model in KSP was chosen for its computational simplicity, which allows for the extensive maneuver planning tools without requiring high-end hardware to continually re-run n-body simulations at several orders of magnitude faster than realtime.
- Dylan16807 6y agoYou don't need high-end hardware to do an approximate simulation of a handful of gravitational sources. Also it wouldn't be terrible if maneuver nodes took a tenth of a second to update, and they weren't even in the game for a significant while.
- ketzo 6y agoWorth noting that the game came out in 2011, and they wanted people to be able to play it on laptops. They were aiming for really minimal computation.
- Dylan16807 6y agoI mean it's the actual craft physics that are hard to calculate and bog down computers, and you'll never be doing those and orbit fast-forwarding at the same time.