Comment by nonameiguess

Knowledge of actual physics. Explosions can "easily" be simulated from first principles. Easily in scare quotes because it takes quite a bit of computing power. This was actually my wife's first job back in 2003, simulating missile strikes for the Naval Research Lab. A thorough simulation took a few days back then, but given that was almost 20 years ago, I'm sure it's a lot faster now.

In contrast, think of what you'd need to do this via machine learning. You'd need to gather data from actual missile strikes first and learn approximation functions from that. While it's certainly doable, this is inherently less accurate, thanks to both approximation error and measurement error. It's not like pixels -> cat where the true function isn't known.