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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I believe I saw a Scott Manley video recently where he mentioned that he does consulting work for people, and one of his customers apparently doesn't know about KSP because he built their simulation in something like a day and they were astonished that he was done already.

Most of the SpaceX commentators use it too.

It's always cool to me when something meant as a toy gets used for real. Like city planners practicing in SimCity or more recently CitySkylines.

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For those that haven't seen the video, he consulted on the Netflix film 'Stowaway' (that comes out later this month). He whipped up a design for the proposed spacecraft in a few minutes to help the directors visualize it better.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCwXJMVVdck

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.

It always struck me as weird that you have to mod KSP just to make gravity assists work accurately or Lagrange points work at all.

The 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.

You 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.

Worth 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.

I 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.

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