What is real vs modeled
Real, historical: the 4,000 t class vehicle, the ~20 m plate, oil-film ablation protection, two-stage shock absorbers, the delivery gun, shaped-charge pulse units, the 1959 Putt-Putt flight, the 1963 treaty, and the era's Iₛₚ estimates (roughly 1,800-2,500 s) are from the declassified record (G. Dyson, Project Orion, 2002). Modeled: the geometry is a schematic, not a blueprint. Δv per pulse (12 m/s·√kt), accelerations, magazine count and plate temperatures are first-order teaching estimates. The fireball and plasma jet are stylised and last far longer on screen than the real microseconds, so you can see them.