Physics optimization and general lag reduction with large part counts.

[Redoti99]

Ive been thinking about an idea for a mod, and was wondering if its at least theoretically possible before attempting to get it commissioned or do something with the idea in general

Big part counts slow the game down, from my understanding the main contributor to this is the fact that every part contains a rigidbody component. I wanted to see if disabling these rigidbodies was possible.

From my understanding, since parts are always parented to the root of the vessel, only the root part of every stage would need to have a rigidbody component, and the rest inherits the transforms of the root part just by the nature of being parented to it. This would lower the rigid body count by a very significant amount.

I am assuming it would cause problems with collisions and drag calculations though. I feel like these issues are something that can be figured out, the meshes used to calculate drag could be combined in some way and collisions could still be calculated separately from my understanding.

This is all just off of my very limited experience with unity and my Guesses about how KSP works.

The idea for this seems fairly simple on paper, which means there must be some limiting factor, otherwise someone would have done this already. I would just like to know what that is.

Am I saying complete nonsense or is something like this conceivable ?