How realistic is spaceflight in video games?

Orbiter Space Flight Simulator recreates the larger bodies of the Solar System and emulates orbital physics very realistically, and you can fly a number of real and near realistic vessels. Launch, transfer orbit to any body, and land. The best part is that it’s free.
 
How realistic is spaceflight in video games? From takeoff to interstellar travel, let's look at some popular games to see how they stack up.

How realistic is spaceflight in video games? : Read more
Every once in a while you see an article like this.
The fact is, spaceflight is in it's infancy here on Earth, and to be honest so is physics.
There is no way we could ever, at this stage of the game, say how "realistic" space flight is portrayed in video games or movies that are set far into the future considering the only thing we know about it is what we have achieved in about a 60 year span.

The entire exercise is pretty much useless.

It's like someone from 2000 years ago asking how realistic our air flight is by comparing it to the fact they can't even do it. They would say it was totally impossible and unrealistic.

Note that none of the probes we have sent up with communications dishes and huge solar panels have been hit with debris, and in fact some of them have flown through the rings of Saturn without issue.

I hardly think the engines on the Enterprise would be an issue. If they were, then the entire ship would be in danger of being destroyed by debris, not just the engines. However, as any good Trekkie knows, the navigational deflector is there specifically to divert any debris.

And, in case anyone is unaware, in the original documentation for Star Trek, the reason the warp engines are so far away from the hull is because of the radiation they create. If they were closer, you wouldn't need heat to cook the crew, the radiation would do it far quicker. This is one of the reasons why newer designs, such as the Defiant from DS9, don't make much sense in the Star Trek universe.

I stopped reading the article. I don't think it's very good.
 
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Interstellar distances are so large that travel within a human lifetime involves so incredibly much energy, there is no way to get it. You need to convert a substantial portion of the mass of the craft to energy. It is more than could be converted using fission or fusion. Anti matter might work, but it is very difficult to make. You might need perhaps a couple hundred tons of it. All of our accelerators running throughout all of history have made about a microgram. Plus its sort of hard to store. Plus 75% of it ends up as neutrinos and you can't do a thing with them.
 

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