Thank you for your answer!
Just to “keep track of all the options”, right now I see these possible approaches:
1 - Child actors - I’ve completely disregarded this approach, as something as simple as a physics constrain turns into a setup nightmare and this approach is very complex in general, with limited resources/tutorials available.
2 - Each part is an actor, but some are pawns (like cockpits) + attach actor to actor - I’m not sure how adding physics constrains will work with this, could you elaborate? Just keeping the relative position is not enough if your goal is to have complex physics simulation (e.g. allow high overload to break connections). Other than that, seems like a very versatile approach, maybe with a downside of performance.
3 - A craft is a single pawn, all parts are just Static Mesh Components (discussed here) - this should give the best performance and managing parts. However, this approach has quite a few limitations or hidden pitfalls, some are mentioned in the discussion linked above.
Have I missed anything?