On practicality vs. plausibility

[Pds314]

I've seen a lot of people express incredulity at the fact that certain impractical designs work in KSP, even with realism mods.

I think the thing they're getting hung up on us that most things that would work in real life ARE impractical. Yes, you could build a fighter armed with a 120mm cannon turret in real life, but no, nobody would spend the millions or billions of dollars in research and development on such a useless combat system because there are so many impractical things about it. Same goes with, say, wing configurations or number of boosters. Yeah, most things will work, as in they will fly, but there are obvious design improvements that any self-respecting engineer would make, and that's where fantasy designs usually lose to more practical, realistic designs. Case-in-point, people have made rc-planes designed to look like the Enterprise-D from Star Trek. Real life physics allows ridiculous designs to work, to some extent. It just makes them far less practical than, well, practical designs.

[Guest]

Okay.

[swjr-swis]

55 minutes ago, Pds314 said:

I've seen a lot of people express incredulity at the fact that certain impractical designs work in KSP, even with realism mods.

I love testing the limits of impractical designs in KSP. To me, it's one of the things I enjoy, almost every time I play. If it was down to just making what is practical, efficient and economical IRL, it'd be a very boring simulation that I would've stop using a long time ago.

The way I see it, KSP gives me a set of laws and constraints that are valid for that one environment only. Period. Any extrapolation of it to any real or imaginary other environment, whether it be Real Life, or some other simulator annex game, or even another KSP install but with a different version or mod set, I consider pretty pointless.

Sure, I love that it teaches me basic things that I could encounter in other places, like Real Life. But I try to never make the mistake of expecting things to work the same way. 1) because there's a limitation to the accuracy of the simulation, both due to complexity and to explicit choice of the devs. 2) because I don't have unlimited access to funds, materials, technology or timewarp that would allow me to do the same things IRL. Reversely, what would be the point of spending time in a simulation where I can't do anything more or different than what I can already do? I want to test the impractical, improbable, and impossible.

Coincidentally, I'm having great difficulty with my attempt at getting a stock Enterprise to fly controllably in KSP. In this case, KSP limits me more than what Real Life would allow.

[steuben]

I've always considered practical usually implies plausible, but not always. You can put a kerbal on a command chair and let him tour the system and still get him home. Practical, but not plausible.

Of course plausible does not imply practical... though sometimes rule of cool trumps that.

 

[MarvinKitFox]

17 hours ago, Pds314 said:

.... Yes, you could build a fighter armed with a 120mm cannon turret in real life, but no,

You mean this sort of thing?

Ok, so its only a 105mm, but....

 

Never try to put a limit to human stupidity.

[Fearless Son]

My understanding is that the folks at NASA who play KSP enjoy it because they have so many crazy rocket designs in their heads that "should work" but would be too impractical to build, and this lets them go joyfully nuts with it.  

[cantab]

KSP does an excellent job of orbital mechanics, a very good job of rocket propulsion (glossing over real issues like limited ignitions and fuel boiloff), and a good job of aerodynamics now. But it does a poor job of structural mechanics, it's one step above treating the ship as a single solid lump but it's not realistic at all. That allows a lot of unlikely designs to behave in KSP.