Tenacious-Techhunter said:You are the one who said you could reason about these things. So do it. Put your knowledge of physics to work with what the game materials provide. Except you can’t. Because it’s nonsense that can’t be reasoned about.
The ship and vehicle design system are to make things easy; not to make things possible. If it’s not possible to reason about something like this, it’s not possible for players to adapt them by applying reason.
You're being deliberately argumentative here. I don't need to prove anything, the design systems are there. I don't need to understand how thruster plates work - that's what skill rolls are for. "Make a Difficult Enginnering roll to jury-rig the thruster plates so that they can connect to the air raft's power supply in order to be able to lift and move it". Done.
Your mentality here seems to be that because it's unrealistic, it must be impossible to think of solutions. Well, sure, but we as players don't need to understand how it works - that's for the characters in the setting to do, based on what they know (i.e. their skills and Int and Edu). Same with any other roll - obviously I as a player can't figure out how to calculate a targeting solution for ship weapons, but my player who has Gunnery sure might be able to!
If you can't grasp that separation then I think you are rather missing the point of RPGs.