Simulators fundamentally select some specific part of reality, and abstracts everything else away.

Ultimately, we come back to the same question: What are you trying to achieve? A very very minor part of what managing space hardware actually entails. Where's the engine development, testing, quality control, assembly, equipment failure, etc.? If all the program does is applying the acceleration vector an engine produces, those same calculations could be done on the back of an envelope. 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:

For all simulators, the core question is: What is it trying to simulate?

Kerbal space program mods