Context: I'm looking at Norman Wildberger's rational trigonometry[1], and here I was wondering how useful it is in physics. So I thought about testing it with the famous simple pendulum exercise.
It's not obvious we get any FPS gain, but still I find it cool to even be able to get the same result differently.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_trigonometry
This thinking also applies to orbital simulations -- in an elliptical orbit, an object's radius from the central mass, and its velocity, are constantly changing, but (barring friction) its energy, the sum of GPE and KE, must be a constant.