A July 2022 renovation of the reality-check tag and others has changed the context of this question. It is now obsolete. Please see the following question and the link under "Conclusion." If we can't burn the "reality check" tag, can we rename it?
I'm relatively new here so this is possibly ground that's been covered but I can't find it.
My reading, and rereading, of Reality-Check is that this tag denotes a question concerning the internal consistency of a scenario and/or solutions to a problem put within a particular framework that usually involves a degree of handwaiving.
By the same token Science-Based and Hard-Science are degrees of proof of concept within the existing material laws we deal with every day.
(The over is my very literal interpretation of what I'm reading, I've probably missed some of the nuances that others see, Asperger's is problematic that way. There are probably also things about these tags that people who've seen them evolve take for granted that I have no concept of.)
Given this reading the argument that Reality-Check is somehow a soft version of Science-Based appears to be baseless as they describe different and separate requirements. Plenty of Reality-Check questions have no basis in science at all while those that do don't necessarily require science in their answers i.e. you can ask a question about a scenario that is entirely scientifically sound but requires only a test of logic from the community. As such why is specifying that an answer be both internally logical (Reality-Check) and scientifically sound (Science-Based) an issue? Certainly Science questions are generally logical but don't necessarily ask for clarifications of their internal logic the way a Reality-Check question does.
I'm getting a little lost here, what I'm asking is this: what have I missed about Reality-Check that relates it directly to scientific standards of proof? Since I'm getting told repeatedly that a Reality-Check is a "soft standard" for a sub-scientific burden of proof instead of what it says it is which is "is this internally logical?".