neomagus00

I'm no expert, but from what I've gathered, I think this is a misunderstanding. FAR wraps the whole craft in a mesh (like this), then calculates aero forces on each point of the mesh. So it's actually treating the craft as thousands of separate points. Doing physics on the parts is pretty similar, actually - each part has a "point" at its center(*), and you calculate physics on each point. They're just joined together in a tree structure, rather than a mesh. In both cases, it's a cycle of (draw mesh / parts -> calculate and combine forces -> update part positions), which happens every time a frame is rendered(**). You're right that it would be more efficient to treat the whole craft as a rigid body, and model it as a single point. But DocMop nailed it, your plane wouldn't be able to bend, or move ailerons, and so on. Remember, you don't care only about catastrophic failure: your wings should bend with increasing load, and your center of mass should change as fuel burns off, etc., otherwise it would feel like an old arcade game. -neo (*): I assume KSP is detailed enough to use center of pressure, center of mass, etc. accurately, but the center of the part is usually a pretty good approximation to all of these. (**): This is a guess. Physics updates may be more frequent in KSP, I'm not sure if it does physics at a different rate than graphics. E.g. racing games often calculate physics WAY more often than they update the screen, for better accuracy.