The closest it gets to physical simulation is newtonian gravity (not that that really matters much when you're flying ships with practically reactionless thrust, just means some planets are slightly trickier to land on with thruster modules which haven't been upgraded) and ship movement when you turn the assist off that emulates a plane style flight model (although this also doesn't mean much in terms of realism because there's a speed cap, so you can't just keep thrusting and accelerating.
You can only interact with planets with no atmosphere or a thin one. But IIRC stars of all types and black holes can destroy your ship if you get too close). Some of the models for irl nebulae are cool, although unrealistically presented in the sense that they're blatantly visible. While the milky way is modeled to a realistic scale, the vast majority of it is empty and might as well not even exist.
I'm not saying that they don't exist, but that they add so little (due to mostly just being nothing but another variation of the same handful of planet types with norhing to do there), that they might as well not exist.
The closest it gets to physical simulation is newtonian gravity (not that that really matters much when you're flying ships with practically reactionless thrust, just means some planets are slightly trickier to land on with thruster modules which haven't been upgraded) and ship movement when you turn the assist off that emulates a plane style flight model (although this also doesn't mean much in terms of realism because there's a speed cap, so you can't just keep thrusting and accelerating.
You can only interact with planets with no atmosphere or a thin one. But IIRC stars of all types and black holes can destroy your ship if you get too close). Some of the models for irl nebulae are cool, although unrealistically presented in the sense that they're blatantly visible. While the milky way is modeled to a realistic scale, the vast majority of it is empty and might as well not even exist.