Real World Mechanics Simulated By KSP ?

[StrandedonEarth]

-rocket structural stability. (KSP rockets are much, much more bendable and flexible than real-world rockets)

See the "Wobbly Rockets " link in my sig for an example of this. I made that clip in 0.90, but I don't think the flexibility has changed much.

One other difference from IRL. Kerbin's atmosphere cuts off abruptly at 70km. You can watch your huge, draggy station in a 71kmx71km orbit forever, and the orbit will never decay, but at 69x69, it will eventually decay (unless on rails). IRL, while the 'boundary' of where space begins is agreed at 100km, it doesn't end there, it just keeps getting thinner. The ISS orbits at around 400km, but its orbit will decay due to atmospheric drag without occasional reboosts.

[Psycho_zs]

I personally nerfed all reaction wheels 10 times with this MM patch:

@PART
[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleReactionWheel]]:FINAL {
    @MODULE[ModuleReactionWheel] {
        @PitchTorque *= 0.1
        @YawTorque *= 0.1
        @RollTorque *= 0.1
    }
}

GIves much more sense to RCS

[Wanderfound]

If you're wanting to up your game realism, you certainly want FAR. Stock aero is no longer as awful as it used to be, but it's still a long way from a simulation.

However, given that the latest release represents a major overhaul to FAR, and was released only a few hours ago, you might want to give it a few days to get the inevitable bugs worked out.

[TythosEternal]

The gravity model implemented by KSP is called a "restricted two-body" approximation. This means two things, specifically:

* For the motion of a given object, only the influence of one other (significantly more massive) object is considered. "Significantly more massive" means the larger object does not need to model the influence of the smaller object when considering its own motion. Getting rid of this assumption lets you model n-body forces (sun, moon, etc.) at the expense of complexity and predictability.

* Both bodies are treated as point masses. This is actually just as big a deal as the first assumption, depending on where you are flying. This is important because (to use one example) the Earth is not a perfect sphere with uniformly-distributed mass. Discrepancies in the parent body's gravitational field can produce some really interesting short-term and long-term effects on the motion of a spacecraft (sun-synchronous orbits, true Molniya, localized gravity wells and instabilities/stabilities, etc.).

The term "patched conics" actually refers to the way trajectories are broken into, and across, spheres of influence: "patched" because you assume discrete transitions between SOIs, and "conics" because an orbit modeled by the restricted two-body approximation will trace a conic section (i.e., a circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola) in inertial space.

The aerodynamic differences have been discussed to death already. One thing that hasn't received suitable attention, though, is the lack of radiation pressure forces. This would be easy to implement (assuming uniform radiation pressure extending from Kerbol and no other magnetic field influence), and would let users build and fly spacecraft driven by solar sails. I don't know how much value that would add to the game, though.