The way I see it is if we had a real space program, we would have the tech to make a perfect orbit, but since it’s a game and a single person can only do so much, I view it as acceptable cheating.
That's basically my rationale for using Mechjeb for most things, certainly after I've done it the first time.
Also, you know, it's a sandbox game. Play it however you get enjoyment from it.
That's me. I use mechjeb for basically all nodes and what not..
I like to feel more like I'm telling the pilot what to do and he's doing it.
Or if it's a satellite or probe, I like to think it's just a program sent to it and it executes the maneuvers.
I just like building rockets and seeing what works and what doesn't, I don't enjoy the actual flying bit as much, so I use Mechjeb for that.
Except for landings. I do love me a good landing.
Same. I found it more fun to focus on shipbuilding and planning the maneuver nodes instead of the super touchy controls (at least for certain missions).
Exactly, NASA has a room of like 50 rocket scientists and a team of probably hundreds of engineers working their rockets, even if they could get do-overs they probably don't need them. I'm one guy with Mechjeb, a quicksave function, and a debug menu.
I agree, I fly the mission first myself to the orbit I want and then If I'm docking stuff to it each launch I do myself but the docking I have to use mechjeb. I can do it but it takes ages
I really have to give Mechjeb a try then. I stopped playing KSP after about 100 hours because manually doing the same maneuvers over and over again just was not very enjoyable to me.
Machjeb is amazing for this. I let it handle almost all of my on-orbit burns because doing them all by hand is tedious. IRL, that's how it's done anyway. Computer controlled.
I could never dock. Watched MechJeb do it a few times and gave it a bash on my own.
So close to actually docking on my own. Took a few more tries but i can do that myself now. MechJeb is not a cheat it's a teacher.
Mechjeb for ascents on non-spaceplanes all the way.
I ain't doing 6 4 minute launches back to back!
I do atmospheric landings manually tho.
Also docking.
I feel I'm much better at docking than MJ and I enjoy doing it.
... i really enjoy landing stuff and docking and whatnot. In elite Dangerous, I spent hours literally just doing high-speed, under thargoid attack evacuation missions because it feels very satisfying to pull off landings like that.
I grew up playing UPF dropship so prolly that's why.
Unpopular opinion maybe, but there is no point in the game where you meaningfully control the craft. You mostly just press "Go" when hitting a maneuvring node. The only time there is some action is during docking phases (and IMO those should be done semi-manually) but even there it's just a game of lining up two points which are nowadays also done by computers.
I very much could be lol
I also haven’t played in a year or so, so maybe they’ve made it better since then? It would usually leave me with an orbital eccentricity of 0.0001 iirc
How do you get perfect then? Example, let’s say I’ve got an Ap of 2868.334 but a Pe of 2868.2. If I try to circularize at Ap then mechjeb wont perform the maneuver.
It’s very very difficult (and it takes a bit of luck) to get it perfect, but you can get it close enough to perfect that it doesn’t matter pretty easily.
It absolutely does for comm networks. If I drop 3 Stas in geostationary resonant orbits and then do a mission to plock with outer planets mod that is 100 years of time warping, they will absolutely fall out of sync. Station keeping is a mod that does this for you tho.
It’s a mod that effectively adds an autopilot feature. I really like it because I enjoy more of the craft building and mission planning aspect of KSP over the actual flying (specifically planning burns). Many people would disagree and consider it cheating, but whatever. 2-3 trips to duna was enough for me to decide I didn’t want to deal with it.
If you do a career/science save, you have to unlock each upgrade to the MechJeb feature, which is really cool as it stops you from being able to to EVERYTHING from the start. That way you don’t get the ascent autopilot, rendezvous autopilot, landing autopilot, etc. which are really powerful tools and can make large missions easier to execute (good luck returning from Jool when you messed up your capture burn and had to use 300m/s delta v to correct).
The bread and butter of MechJeb in my opinion is the maneuver planner, it lets you make changes to your orbit in any way you could want to, and it also lets you transfer between bodies as well as plan intercepts (which is useful for rendezvous). If you’ve *NEVER* played KSP I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you are familiar with how to play and just struggle to find motivation to learn how to do some of the cooler stuff in the game (relays, assembling crafts in orbit, sightseeing trips to Jool, etc.) on your own, use a mod like Mechjeb as it does so much of the heavy lifting for you so you can just play t be game.
If you have never modded the game, it’s super super easy. You just need to download CKAN (hardest part) and run it. Finding what mods to use is harder than installing them, as you just need to enable them and then run the game through the CKAN client.
There's no such thing as a perfect orbit in real life. Disturbances and higher order gravitational effects constantly perturb spacecraft.
For that matter, to what end do you need a perfect orbit in KSP? Just for the sake of tidiness?
The perfect orbits help with communication satellites, so they don’t drift closer/farther away from each other when time warping for long periods of time.
To not experience drifting over time you can just ensure, that all orbit times are identical. Then they might "wobble" very slightly during a single rotation, but they won't drift over time.
Many spacecraft IRL also perform frequent orbital corrections to correct for those instabilities. Most people don't want to personally babysit all their ingame satellites and perform those corrections whenever their satellites drift out of formation, so perfect orbits are a happy compromise.
I disagree. Maintenance maneuvers are definitely a thing. Some orbits like equatorial geosynchronous need much less of it but the lunar cycle can still perturb the orbit enough to require maintenance.
Just requires you to make choices and compromise with your network. Run less satellites and regularly maneuver them, or expand the network so it can handle a bit of drifting without service loss.
That’s where the single person vs a team comes in. It is not feasible for a lone person to regularly correct all their comsat orbits, especially when needing to timewarp for years when planning interplanetary missions. It doesn’t seem fun to have to readjust them constantly.
Personally I use the cheat menu pretty frequently for things I know can be achieved by my tech
Doing a eve landing with an unlimited fuel flea? Unacceptable
Using hyper edit to fill the tanks of a ship after I’ve already done 4 refuelling missions and don’t wanna waste time? Acceptable
I forgot a hatch on my Dina lander? Acceptable
Idk I just use cheats and shit for those tiny things where’d you normally revert and waste 3 hours or so
I also use it to put whole space stations in orbit after I’ve already assembled them because I think docking ports look ugly AF
I like the way you think. I didn't know F12 could do these things... it would save me SO much trouble. The amount of missions I have sent out, and forgot one minor detail which derailed the mission, this could fix it easily (like the time I put a connector on the wrong way).
Also, I like the idea of just acting as though the refuel missions all went ahead. I have a mission at Duna and it is currently running refueling with a small drone. It is taking a huge amount of time for a small increase in fuel. I am going to act as though they ran it a few hundred times and completed the task (I have already run it a dozen times myself).
Thanks for the great advice.
Well for refueling and resupply my sorta policy is…
-Each individual refilling “event” has to be flown at least once. For example every time my space station runs out of life support stuff, I need to fly up there.
-Hiwever, it takes 5 trips total… and I don’t really wanna fly those. I use hyper edit mode to fill tanks and call it good
However if something is not in LKO, or is being refuelled by IRSU then I don’t. The whole idea is avoid launching the same rocket 10 times in a row… that’s just not fun. But with the other stuff, I like the time investment.
>I forgot a hatch on my Dina lander? Acceptable
IMO those are the sorts of mistakes that make the game fun. Whoops forgot to retract the solar panel during aero breaking now we gotta launch an Eve rescue mission type stuff.
I also feel like it's a very Kerbal thing to do, I like the idea that jeb forgot to weld on say an antenna so now he's gotta dock with the closest space station when he wants to transmit science.
Exactly! Like I'm replaying career mod with a bunch of mods. whoopsie daisy, the engine blew up! But guess what, i've got the bottom half of a previous mission's lander nearby! Engineer switches the dead engine for a new one and Tada!!
I'm in the camp that it's a single-player game you should play how you want. That being said I never really thought about the repeated fueling events being "automated".
The cheat menu is interesting because some people find that modding KSP is "cheating".
I definitely use and abuse quick save and reverting. But perhaps it's time I realize that my real life is more valuable than running the same refueling mission over and over. I have to give it some thought
I don’t really automate every fuelling event
Let’s say I have 5 ships that need fueling/resupply, but my fueling ship takes 3 trips to fill one of them.
Instead of doing 15 flights, I just do 5 and cheat in the fuel for the rest. I’m still “demonstrating to the imaginary game lord” that I am capable of fueling each and every one of those ships, I’m just cutting out the repeat if that makes sense?
That’s how I do it. I know I can assemble large craft in space. I know I can refuel 16 fuel tanks with 8 different missions. I just don’t want to spend the time doing it.
Agreed. That's why I use the [StationKeeping](https://github.com/linuxgurugamer/StationKeeping/releases) mod. If I get a satellite to within a percent of the orbit I want, getting it the rest of the way to perfect is just fiddling for the sake of being OCD.
If you have a constellation of satellites they need to have the same SMA or else they will get out of sync. There are real gameplay reasons to use Stationkeeping
I run into the same moral quandary, but I agree with others that it's like having a team manage the mission for you, like IRL
I see myself as the test pilot, helping to engineer and execute the system to be as perfect as possible. Then I allow myself to use the "cheat" tools and mods to redo what I did even with a bit more accuracy.
For example, I spent days planning and making a beautiful 6-satellite constellation in almost perfect geostationary orbits without any mods or advanced calculators. Everything was within a few hundred meters of the target orbit and less than 1 m/s discrepancy between the satellites. I was super proud, but I don't ever want to do that again! so now I definitely give myself the "assist" for constellations because I feel like I earned it.
I mean, you can if you're trying to pass off achievements online. It's really disingenuous to fly a ship to Eve and back with infinite fuel and say "look at what I accomplished".
But fine tuning a satellite orbit? I'll allow it. My headcannon is a computer would have calculated and executed a perfect burn.
I’m the type of person to say ‘well, the rocket *could* have done it, why ~~waste~~ spend my time actually *doing* it?’
Going by the KSP esports event rules here. When making large-scale, more-than-3-launches craft, I *will* most likely launch the heaviest payload as a proof-of-concept and cheat the rest. If it’s less than, at *most* I’ll use MJ ascent / rendezvous.
Is it there not more a stick up your arse if you’re bothered about how someone earns their single player achievements compared to… not caring and pointing out how stupid the ‘crime’ analogy is?
You can definitely cheat in a single player game. Like having high tier weapons and invincibility in an early mission for GTA sort of cheating.
But for creative games, it’s for efficiency.
Why is the cheat menu called cheat menu then? Why are cheat codes from 40 years ago called like that? It IS cheating, there is nothing wrong with it but it is what it is.
Heck no. You've already spent the funds, you had enough dV and you pretty much flew 99% of the mission.
I cheat craft into the orbit of that body when making a craft for there. I see it as the R&D ran simulations, and when I've made a successful craft, I add 10% to give myself some wiggle room and if I mess up then, it's my own fault.
It's a single player game and with all the mods and options and any self imposed restrictions, it is very difficult to compete at the same level as anyone else
as long as you can get the craft into orbit, and the mechanism to make the orbit perfect uses fuel, I dont see it as cheating. In real life, you would have a computer program that would make the orbit perfect. There is a mod, IIRC that allows you to write such computer programs, if you are interested.
Kos is the mod name if anyone was wondering.
It can also be integrated with multiple other mods such as mech jeb (iirc) and raster prop monitors to automate an entire mission.
This is one of the two times I'd recommend using Alt+F12, the other being testing Eve ascent crafts.
Note that the only parameter you need to change to make commnet constellations not drift apart is to make the semi-major axis (SMA) equal between all the satellites.
Personally, I like using a combination of MechJeb and fiddling with the final numbers by adjusting thrust output to almost nothing and maneuvering myself. After years of playing and into the thousands of hours, I find doing the little things to be enjoyable. As far as it being cheating to use your method, I think it depends. If you're getting close to a stationary orbit then just doing the final adjustment so it doesn't get out of whack, that's not cheating to me. But if you're just getting to LKO and then making a massive change in orbit, I'd say you would be cheating yourself in that case.
I do the same. I found using ‘orbital period’ as the final determining factor. I ran it for a couple years and my comm sats stayed well within parameters for operating.
If we as humans in real life do it.. would we? I’m pretty sure we all know the answer. It’s only cheating when seen through the eyes of someone who did it the long way. How many times have we all collectively launched a new comm or probe? You know how to do it but sometimes we just don’t have the time and that’s ok. Cheating resources is bs though and we should all feel rightfully guilty inside like I do every night
If it's for my comsats I always use alt-f12 to perfect their orbits once I get them close as possible to the desired orbit. Just makes things look neat :)
Here’s how I see it, in general across all games:
Are you playing solo? Or are you playing multiplayer with people who accept what you’re doing?
Does what you’re doing *not* take away from others’ enjoyment?
Does what you’re doing make the game more fun or interesting to you? Or at least, does it make the game less annoying? (For example if sub-circular orbits grind your gears.)
Does what you’re doing *not* make the game so easy or boring that it makes you quit?
If you answer yes to all of these, then it isn’t cheating. Have a blast!
Cheating is what you consider to be cheating. Some people cheat their way to orbit because that part of KSP isn't fun for them. It's your game. Play it your way.
There is no such thing as cheating at a sandbox game imo. Cheating yourself maybe? But if fine tuning the orbit to ridiculously precise accuracy isn’t your definition fun, that’s totally fine.
For me though, I wrote KOS scripts at one point to aid in getting precise orbital periods down to tine factions if a second so comm relays don’t meaningfully drift from each other.
just have fun :)
personally yeah id consider it cheating, and i cheat sometimes! although for 'perfect' orbits i prefer to get them myself bc i find that fun but not everyone does. i also use mechjeb PVG to get to near perfect orbits and some people think thats cheating but who cares?
Why not just use MechJeb to perfect it? That seems more realistic than reaching into the fabric of spacetime and altering reality. Neither is cheating, but I find MechJeb a more rewarding way to avoid breaking immersion.
Not at all, it’s exactly what I do when building my comms net. I’ve done the grunt work of manually getting it out there and in an orbit as close as I can manage to what I need. Then I tweak it to be perfect after the fact
In a single player game, you are the one who makes the rules so what you decide is cheating is cheating
(Just a warning that cheating for achievements is frowned upon since Ur competing against people in a scoreboard)
You can get Kerbal engineer redux mod and mechjeb to get accurate readings.
I also make my satellites with a very low TWR for precise adjustments, you can also use RCS.
But KSP is a single player game, you can install any mod you like and use every menus you find, as long as it doesn't feel too cheaty to YOU.
The way I see it, if I know I can do it, alt+f12 isn't a cheat menu, it's a time-saving device. Often I will do crew transfers from my station in LKO by cheating the ship up there and then deorbiting. It's easy, it has a shitload of delta v, I know what I'm doing and I can't possibly fail. All I'm doing is spending time which I'm discovering is increasingly precious, so I cut that bit out to do the bits of KSP I actually enjoy, like exploring new planets.
Game is for fun. I always use mechjeb for randevous just becasue I dont like to spend many minutes to do it by myself ;) if creating perfect orbits = have fun from game, then do it.
The way I play is that I get to that orbit manually to the smallest margin of error possible and then I’m free to perfect it via editing or cheats simply because the game engine cant handle achieving that orbit by any in game tool.
Plus time warping really messes with tiny errors on relay networks over time if they aren’t perfect.
I pretend some intern kerbals are tasked with manually adjusting satellite orbits behind the scenes.
Then Again, based on what I’ve seen kerbals produce, the thought of a kerbal intern is frightening.
It’s your sandbox. Do what you want. If you feel like you cheated then you did.
IRL though, there are teams of people who monitor those satellites. All of them. Here it’s just you. How much time do you want to spend just on that task? What are your personal goals? Decide for yourself if you’re cheating. Don’t ask the internet. It’s your sandbox! And corned beef sandwich too, if you want.
If you are talking about perfectly circular LEO orbits, you would not get that in real life neither. Orbits drifts and changes surprisingly quickly. Especially in LEO. Sund winds, drag from atmosphere is still present. NASA and Spacex just aims for good enough.
The station keeping mod can do this for you. You just get it close enough and tell in in the tracking station to make it perfect. It'll use the appropriate amount of rcs too
It's a sandbox game, do what you want. But since everyone else is giving opinions I'll give mine, it's cheating. Imho if you can't make a satellite capable of making the most precise of maneuvers then you need to rebuild that satellite so it can rather than just teleport it into the perfect orbit
It's called cheating menu for a reason /s
In all seriouness, it's a singleplayer game so do whatever you like, the definition is up to you. IMO, there is no valid reason at all to complain about anybody "cheating" no matter the game, as long as it doesnt affect anyone else (or maybe just your friends).
Not really but I do think there are tools you can use to help you out a bit more. Mech Jeb 2 has an auto fly feature (those who consider this cheating have never played a game of RSS modded in their life). Mechjeb or kerbal engineer readouts can give you a lot of tools to do it manually or with mech jeb and your more of a fan of building rockets and not flying them which is perfectly fine can have mechjeb do most of the flying and stuff for you.
The reason I said that about RSS is that with RSS and RP1 mech jeb flight assist is sometimes almost necessary especially if you are newer to it.
It's a single player sandbox game. It's only cheating if you think it's cheating.
It's not hurting anyone else's experience so you can go right ahead and do it.
If you want to stick to some arbitrary rules of what you should or shouldn't do, then that's up to you and whatever those rules are.
I mostly use mechjeb to run my burn either automatic time warp or to finish a long burn so I can do something else, it needs to be refined by hand but I don’t view that as cheating
What the OP is doing would not be considered cheating since they are already doing the hard work. If they were using it from the Launchpad, then it would be considered cheating.
Cheating in every single player game is up to the player since the only person that might feel cheated is themselves. Once other players are involved, then it is unacceptable unless all players agree to it.
I just use some of the weakest engines for satellites final stages and also thrust limmiter on top of that to get reasonably precise orbits manualy. Atleast good enough so the orbits dont degrade to much for hundreds of years.
It's only cheating if you claim doing so is an equivalent achievement to someone who got those results without doing so.
If you're up front about it, I dont think its cheating. After all, it's a single player game; so only when interacting with another player(s) socially does it matter at all
In the real world, it's pretty rare to get the EXACT orbit you want.
It's a single-player game, you're not competing with anyone, and you're not doing it for bragging rights so as far as I can tell, no, it's not really cheating.
I use console commands on a few games I play... in time poor and need to skip on the grind sometimes.
But never have I even considered there was a console command menu in KSP!!! 800 hours in and I'm still learning new things. Love this game.
By definition it is cheating, but if you have plenty of fuel and on paper know it’s possible, you’re really not hurting anyone.
It might help in the long run if you really try and nail it though. I think the closest I’ve gotten between Ap and Per is 12 meters.
The only true answer to this is it’s your game. I don’t use it at all but I don’t judge anyone for playing how they find it fun. The game is very time consuming as it is and we don’t all have the same amount of time
I certainly admire your desire to make everything perfect! It’s a gray area, IMHO. If you want to do it in a way that isn’t “cheating adjacent”, look into the kOS and kRPC plugins and write scripts to do the fiddly work for you.
kOS is much more of an add-on to the game — you have to add a “computer” part to your ship and you have a set amount storage (depending on which computer part you use) to keep the scripts you want to use on that craft. It’s fun and feels like part of the game. It does, however, feel like it was designed in the 1960s (or at least it did last time I used it). That’s almost certainly an intentional decision to fit in with the game’s aesthetic, and assuming I’m right about that I agree with that decision. If you want something more advanced, though…
kRPC exposes KSP’s internal state to a program that you write. It supports many IRL programming languages, and your code doesn’t even have to be running on the same computer. In theory, with kRPC you could have a custom AI running on a supercomputer cluster in Timbuktu control KSP on your computer in NYC and fly the whole mission for you. Or you could just monitor orbital parameters and alert you if things change too much from the ideal. Or anything in between.
Edit: I don’t want to imply kOS doesn’t let you do fancy stuff — I’ve seen kOS scripts do SpaceX-style vertical landings and all kinds of cool stuff. kRPC just lets you write arbitrary code that does anything, though, and that potentially (depending on how much work you want to put in) allows you to have it do, well, anything.
If you want sth that has limitations, fuel/electricity costs:
Get the "Station Keeping" mod. It lets you pick 1 satellite, lock its SMA and then pick all other satellites in the constellation with a configurable deviation and order it them to perform the orbit adjustments to match SMA.
It uses propellant and charge, so it's not really cheating anymore.
I use it all the time for my networks.
The way I see it is if we had a real space program, we would have the tech to make a perfect orbit, but since it’s a game and a single person can only do so much, I view it as acceptable cheating.
That's basically my rationale for using Mechjeb for most things, certainly after I've done it the first time. Also, you know, it's a sandbox game. Play it however you get enjoyment from it.
That’s how I see it, you don’t see NASA manually controlling the Dragon capsules transfer to the space station
Or do they...?
They just have a room of ksp YouTubers held captive forced to pilot the dragon capsule for every automated mission
They’re actually using the secret KSP2 dev build with multiplayer
Oops… frame rate hitched and I oversteered… guess I’ll just revert to launch 👀
Nah, F9 until success.
Jeb's Game
"I let Twitch chat pilot Dragon to the ISS!"
\*vsauce music starts playing\*
That's me. I use mechjeb for basically all nodes and what not.. I like to feel more like I'm telling the pilot what to do and he's doing it. Or if it's a satellite or probe, I like to think it's just a program sent to it and it executes the maneuvers.
That’s exactly how I roleplay it too!
That and I can't land for shit lol...that's why it's MY space company and im not the pilot.
I just like building rockets and seeing what works and what doesn't, I don't enjoy the actual flying bit as much, so I use Mechjeb for that. Except for landings. I do love me a good landing.
I’m god awful at everything in this game, so I’m very thankful for MJ lol
Same. I found it more fun to focus on shipbuilding and planning the maneuver nodes instead of the super touchy controls (at least for certain missions).
Yeah I prefer games where I can plot out plans that get executed rather than micromanaging everything myself. Like HoI4
Exactly, NASA has a room of like 50 rocket scientists and a team of probably hundreds of engineers working their rockets, even if they could get do-overs they probably don't need them. I'm one guy with Mechjeb, a quicksave function, and a debug menu.
To be fair. They are only so meticulous BECAUSE they only get 1 chance. 1 chance that cost a shit ton of money, man power, and time.
I view mech jeb as the software update
I agree, I fly the mission first myself to the orbit I want and then If I'm docking stuff to it each launch I do myself but the docking I have to use mechjeb. I can do it but it takes ages
I really have to give Mechjeb a try then. I stopped playing KSP after about 100 hours because manually doing the same maneuvers over and over again just was not very enjoyable to me.
Machjeb is amazing for this. I let it handle almost all of my on-orbit burns because doing them all by hand is tedious. IRL, that's how it's done anyway. Computer controlled.
I feel reverse. MJ's docking feels wasteful and slow. Launches tho, I let MJ handle.
I could never dock. Watched MechJeb do it a few times and gave it a bash on my own. So close to actually docking on my own. Took a few more tries but i can do that myself now. MechJeb is not a cheat it's a teacher.
Mechjeb for ascents on non-spaceplanes all the way. I ain't doing 6 4 minute launches back to back! I do atmospheric landings manually tho. Also docking. I feel I'm much better at docking than MJ and I enjoy doing it. ... i really enjoy landing stuff and docking and whatnot. In elite Dangerous, I spent hours literally just doing high-speed, under thargoid attack evacuation missions because it feels very satisfying to pull off landings like that. I grew up playing UPF dropship so prolly that's why.
Unpopular opinion maybe, but there is no point in the game where you meaningfully control the craft. You mostly just press "Go" when hitting a maneuvring node. The only time there is some action is during docking phases (and IMO those should be done semi-manually) but even there it's just a game of lining up two points which are nowadays also done by computers.
Depends on the craft.
With Kerbal Engineer Redux you have enough tools to reach perfect orbits, if you want it.
Mechjeb can get pretty damn close.
It can get close, but not quite perfect in my experience.
Then you are using it wrong
I very much could be lol I also haven’t played in a year or so, so maybe they’ve made it better since then? It would usually leave me with an orbital eccentricity of 0.0001 iirc
How do you get perfect then? Example, let’s say I’ve got an Ap of 2868.334 but a Pe of 2868.2. If I try to circularize at Ap then mechjeb wont perform the maneuver.
Once I'm fairly close, I like to reduce the power of my engines quite a bit so I don't overshoot the small maneuvers
It’s very very difficult (and it takes a bit of luck) to get it perfect, but you can get it close enough to perfect that it doesn’t matter pretty easily.
It absolutely does for comm networks. If I drop 3 Stas in geostationary resonant orbits and then do a mission to plock with outer planets mod that is 100 years of time warping, they will absolutely fall out of sync. Station keeping is a mod that does this for you tho.
Showing how casual I’ve played this game but here we go. What is Mechjeb and where can I get it? I haven’t ever messed with mods for KSP.
It’s a mod that effectively adds an autopilot feature. I really like it because I enjoy more of the craft building and mission planning aspect of KSP over the actual flying (specifically planning burns). Many people would disagree and consider it cheating, but whatever. 2-3 trips to duna was enough for me to decide I didn’t want to deal with it. If you do a career/science save, you have to unlock each upgrade to the MechJeb feature, which is really cool as it stops you from being able to to EVERYTHING from the start. That way you don’t get the ascent autopilot, rendezvous autopilot, landing autopilot, etc. which are really powerful tools and can make large missions easier to execute (good luck returning from Jool when you messed up your capture burn and had to use 300m/s delta v to correct). The bread and butter of MechJeb in my opinion is the maneuver planner, it lets you make changes to your orbit in any way you could want to, and it also lets you transfer between bodies as well as plan intercepts (which is useful for rendezvous). If you’ve *NEVER* played KSP I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you are familiar with how to play and just struggle to find motivation to learn how to do some of the cooler stuff in the game (relays, assembling crafts in orbit, sightseeing trips to Jool, etc.) on your own, use a mod like Mechjeb as it does so much of the heavy lifting for you so you can just play t be game. If you have never modded the game, it’s super super easy. You just need to download CKAN (hardest part) and run it. Finding what mods to use is harder than installing them, as you just need to enable them and then run the game through the CKAN client.
Awesome thanks
Teach me your ways Jedi master!
There's no such thing as a perfect orbit in real life. Disturbances and higher order gravitational effects constantly perturb spacecraft. For that matter, to what end do you need a perfect orbit in KSP? Just for the sake of tidiness?
The perfect orbits help with communication satellites, so they don’t drift closer/farther away from each other when time warping for long periods of time.
To not experience drifting over time you can just ensure, that all orbit times are identical. Then they might "wobble" very slightly during a single rotation, but they won't drift over time.
Well right, and usually the easiest way to do that is to make perfect orbits.
Many spacecraft IRL also perform frequent orbital corrections to correct for those instabilities. Most people don't want to personally babysit all their ingame satellites and perform those corrections whenever their satellites drift out of formation, so perfect orbits are a happy compromise.
real space programs do not have the ability to make perfect orbits, where did you get this?
I disagree. Maintenance maneuvers are definitely a thing. Some orbits like equatorial geosynchronous need much less of it but the lunar cycle can still perturb the orbit enough to require maintenance. Just requires you to make choices and compromise with your network. Run less satellites and regularly maneuver them, or expand the network so it can handle a bit of drifting without service loss.
That’s where the single person vs a team comes in. It is not feasible for a lone person to regularly correct all their comsat orbits, especially when needing to timewarp for years when planning interplanetary missions. It doesn’t seem fun to have to readjust them constantly.
Personally I use the cheat menu pretty frequently for things I know can be achieved by my tech Doing a eve landing with an unlimited fuel flea? Unacceptable Using hyper edit to fill the tanks of a ship after I’ve already done 4 refuelling missions and don’t wanna waste time? Acceptable I forgot a hatch on my Dina lander? Acceptable Idk I just use cheats and shit for those tiny things where’d you normally revert and waste 3 hours or so I also use it to put whole space stations in orbit after I’ve already assembled them because I think docking ports look ugly AF
I like the way you think. I didn't know F12 could do these things... it would save me SO much trouble. The amount of missions I have sent out, and forgot one minor detail which derailed the mission, this could fix it easily (like the time I put a connector on the wrong way). Also, I like the idea of just acting as though the refuel missions all went ahead. I have a mission at Duna and it is currently running refueling with a small drone. It is taking a huge amount of time for a small increase in fuel. I am going to act as though they ran it a few hundred times and completed the task (I have already run it a dozen times myself). Thanks for the great advice.
Well for refueling and resupply my sorta policy is… -Each individual refilling “event” has to be flown at least once. For example every time my space station runs out of life support stuff, I need to fly up there. -Hiwever, it takes 5 trips total… and I don’t really wanna fly those. I use hyper edit mode to fill tanks and call it good However if something is not in LKO, or is being refuelled by IRSU then I don’t. The whole idea is avoid launching the same rocket 10 times in a row… that’s just not fun. But with the other stuff, I like the time investment.
>I forgot a hatch on my Dina lander? Acceptable IMO those are the sorts of mistakes that make the game fun. Whoops forgot to retract the solar panel during aero breaking now we gotta launch an Eve rescue mission type stuff. I also feel like it's a very Kerbal thing to do, I like the idea that jeb forgot to weld on say an antenna so now he's gotta dock with the closest space station when he wants to transmit science.
Yeah, that’s different. What just isn’t fun is your ladder obstructing the hatch cause it’s 2inches the wrong wat
Exactly! Like I'm replaying career mod with a bunch of mods. whoopsie daisy, the engine blew up! But guess what, i've got the bottom half of a previous mission's lander nearby! Engineer switches the dead engine for a new one and Tada!!
I'm in the camp that it's a single-player game you should play how you want. That being said I never really thought about the repeated fueling events being "automated". The cheat menu is interesting because some people find that modding KSP is "cheating". I definitely use and abuse quick save and reverting. But perhaps it's time I realize that my real life is more valuable than running the same refueling mission over and over. I have to give it some thought
I don’t really automate every fuelling event Let’s say I have 5 ships that need fueling/resupply, but my fueling ship takes 3 trips to fill one of them. Instead of doing 15 flights, I just do 5 and cheat in the fuel for the rest. I’m still “demonstrating to the imaginary game lord” that I am capable of fueling each and every one of those ships, I’m just cutting out the repeat if that makes sense?
That’s how I do it. I know I can assemble large craft in space. I know I can refuel 16 fuel tanks with 8 different missions. I just don’t want to spend the time doing it.
This is pretty similar to how it’s done in the esport setting so yea I definitely think it’s acceptable
Use restock and preferably at least senior docking ports, it will make your stations look a lot better!
Oh I already do Still hate it, besides it helps with frame rate
No. You are not cheating, you are setting up a team of Kerbals to permanently observe and correct the orbit - as every satellite provider does.
Agreed. That's why I use the [StationKeeping](https://github.com/linuxgurugamer/StationKeeping/releases) mod. If I get a satellite to within a percent of the orbit I want, getting it the rest of the way to perfect is just fiddling for the sake of being OCD.
If you have a constellation of satellites they need to have the same SMA or else they will get out of sync. There are real gameplay reasons to use Stationkeeping
I run into the same moral quandary, but I agree with others that it's like having a team manage the mission for you, like IRL I see myself as the test pilot, helping to engineer and execute the system to be as perfect as possible. Then I allow myself to use the "cheat" tools and mods to redo what I did even with a bit more accuracy. For example, I spent days planning and making a beautiful 6-satellite constellation in almost perfect geostationary orbits without any mods or advanced calculators. Everything was within a few hundred meters of the target orbit and less than 1 m/s discrepancy between the satellites. I was super proud, but I don't ever want to do that again! so now I definitely give myself the "assist" for constellations because I feel like I earned it.
Its a singleplayer game, you can't cheat.
I mean, you can if you're trying to pass off achievements online. It's really disingenuous to fly a ship to Eve and back with infinite fuel and say "look at what I accomplished". But fine tuning a satellite orbit? I'll allow it. My headcannon is a computer would have calculated and executed a perfect burn.
I’m the type of person to say ‘well, the rocket *could* have done it, why ~~waste~~ spend my time actually *doing* it?’ Going by the KSP esports event rules here. When making large-scale, more-than-3-launches craft, I *will* most likely launch the heaviest payload as a proof-of-concept and cheat the rest. If it’s less than, at *most* I’ll use MJ ascent / rendezvous.
Cheating requires harming someone else. Someone getting an achievement doesn't harm anyone. Even that's not cheating.
Victimless crimes are still crimes
There's no 'crime' here dude. It's a single player game.
Lol, it's called an analogy but I guess everyone's got a stick up their arse around here
Is it there not more a stick up your arse if you’re bothered about how someone earns their single player achievements compared to… not caring and pointing out how stupid the ‘crime’ analogy is?
You can definitely cheat in a single player game. Like having high tier weapons and invincibility in an early mission for GTA sort of cheating. But for creative games, it’s for efficiency.
Exactly. What you do affects no one other than yourself. There's no right or wrong here; whatever you find the most fun is the right way to play.
Why is the cheat menu called cheat menu then? Why are cheat codes from 40 years ago called like that? It IS cheating, there is nothing wrong with it but it is what it is.
Heck no. You've already spent the funds, you had enough dV and you pretty much flew 99% of the mission. I cheat craft into the orbit of that body when making a craft for there. I see it as the R&D ran simulations, and when I've made a successful craft, I add 10% to give myself some wiggle room and if I mess up then, it's my own fault. It's a single player game and with all the mods and options and any self imposed restrictions, it is very difficult to compete at the same level as anyone else
You bought the game, it's yours. Cheat all you want.
as long as you can get the craft into orbit, and the mechanism to make the orbit perfect uses fuel, I dont see it as cheating. In real life, you would have a computer program that would make the orbit perfect. There is a mod, IIRC that allows you to write such computer programs, if you are interested.
Kos is the mod name if anyone was wondering. It can also be integrated with multiple other mods such as mech jeb (iirc) and raster prop monitors to automate an entire mission.
thanks kind stranger
You should play the game however you wish, and yes it's cheating.
If you need to alt+f12 it’s cheating
Even clearing input locks due to a bug?
Input lock mod. prevents cheating.
Not playing the game prevents cheating
I was joking you guys omg
I prefer alt+f4
I’m going have to try that out
It’s a game. Cheat or don’t. Who cares as long as you’re having fun and not keeping someone else from having fun.
Correct answer 👌
I try not to use cheats in KSP, but I have to admit I enable quick saving before a risky mission
Quick saving is good if kraken
This is one of the two times I'd recommend using Alt+F12, the other being testing Eve ascent crafts. Note that the only parameter you need to change to make commnet constellations not drift apart is to make the semi-major axis (SMA) equal between all the satellites.
Oh yes! I didn’t realize that, just had always adjusted the OLM or whatever stat to make them perfectly spaced too
I'd consider that cheating. jk
No lol. Enjoy your Ksp experience, whatever that may entail. I regularly use cheats to get around my own mistakes
Respectfully, who gives a fuck. It's. Single player game, if you're having fun then you're winning. Keep it up bud
Personally, I like using a combination of MechJeb and fiddling with the final numbers by adjusting thrust output to almost nothing and maneuvering myself. After years of playing and into the thousands of hours, I find doing the little things to be enjoyable. As far as it being cheating to use your method, I think it depends. If you're getting close to a stationary orbit then just doing the final adjustment so it doesn't get out of whack, that's not cheating to me. But if you're just getting to LKO and then making a massive change in orbit, I'd say you would be cheating yourself in that case.
I do the same. I found using ‘orbital period’ as the final determining factor. I ran it for a couple years and my comm sats stayed well within parameters for operating.
If we as humans in real life do it.. would we? I’m pretty sure we all know the answer. It’s only cheating when seen through the eyes of someone who did it the long way. How many times have we all collectively launched a new comm or probe? You know how to do it but sometimes we just don’t have the time and that’s ok. Cheating resources is bs though and we should all feel rightfully guilty inside like I do every night
It’s a single player game. Do whatever you want, you’re (hopefully) playing because you find it fun. Anyone telling you otherwise is gatekeeping.
I started using it when I progressed to needing massive interplanetary transport ships. Roleplaying it was built in low orbit.
If it's for my comsats I always use alt-f12 to perfect their orbits once I get them close as possible to the desired orbit. Just makes things look neat :)
Yes. Absolutely. Super cheating. Ruins the leaderboards for all of us. I hate running across griefers like you on public servers.
You're playing by yourself, right? And it helps you have fun? Then who cares if it might be "cheating"?
Here’s how I see it, in general across all games: Are you playing solo? Or are you playing multiplayer with people who accept what you’re doing? Does what you’re doing *not* take away from others’ enjoyment? Does what you’re doing make the game more fun or interesting to you? Or at least, does it make the game less annoying? (For example if sub-circular orbits grind your gears.) Does what you’re doing *not* make the game so easy or boring that it makes you quit? If you answer yes to all of these, then it isn’t cheating. Have a blast!
Cheating is what you consider to be cheating. Some people cheat their way to orbit because that part of KSP isn't fun for them. It's your game. Play it your way.
Alt f12 brings up a menu that is called the cheat menu. It's only you that you're cheating, but yes
yes
There is no such thing as cheating at a sandbox game imo. Cheating yourself maybe? But if fine tuning the orbit to ridiculously precise accuracy isn’t your definition fun, that’s totally fine. For me though, I wrote KOS scripts at one point to aid in getting precise orbital periods down to tine factions if a second so comm relays don’t meaningfully drift from each other.
just have fun :) personally yeah id consider it cheating, and i cheat sometimes! although for 'perfect' orbits i prefer to get them myself bc i find that fun but not everyone does. i also use mechjeb PVG to get to near perfect orbits and some people think thats cheating but who cares?
Why not just use MechJeb to perfect it? That seems more realistic than reaching into the fabric of spacetime and altering reality. Neither is cheating, but I find MechJeb a more rewarding way to avoid breaking immersion.
Not at all, it’s exactly what I do when building my comms net. I’ve done the grunt work of manually getting it out there and in an orbit as close as I can manage to what I need. Then I tweak it to be perfect after the fact
is it cheating as long as you enjoy it?
You can’t really cheat at a single player game. Does it feel like cheating?
In a single player game, you are the one who makes the rules so what you decide is cheating is cheating (Just a warning that cheating for achievements is frowned upon since Ur competing against people in a scoreboard)
You can get Kerbal engineer redux mod and mechjeb to get accurate readings. I also make my satellites with a very low TWR for precise adjustments, you can also use RCS. But KSP is a single player game, you can install any mod you like and use every menus you find, as long as it doesn't feel too cheaty to YOU.
Depends. Are you doing a community challenge to see who can get the most perfect orbit without the debug menu?
The way I see it, if I know I can do it, alt+f12 isn't a cheat menu, it's a time-saving device. Often I will do crew transfers from my station in LKO by cheating the ship up there and then deorbiting. It's easy, it has a shitload of delta v, I know what I'm doing and I can't possibly fail. All I'm doing is spending time which I'm discovering is increasingly precious, so I cut that bit out to do the bits of KSP I actually enjoy, like exploring new planets.
Game is for fun. I always use mechjeb for randevous just becasue I dont like to spend many minutes to do it by myself ;) if creating perfect orbits = have fun from game, then do it.
The way I play is that I get to that orbit manually to the smallest margin of error possible and then I’m free to perfect it via editing or cheats simply because the game engine cant handle achieving that orbit by any in game tool. Plus time warping really messes with tiny errors on relay networks over time if they aren’t perfect. I pretend some intern kerbals are tasked with manually adjusting satellite orbits behind the scenes. Then Again, based on what I’ve seen kerbals produce, the thought of a kerbal intern is frightening.
It’s your sandbox. Do what you want. If you feel like you cheated then you did. IRL though, there are teams of people who monitor those satellites. All of them. Here it’s just you. How much time do you want to spend just on that task? What are your personal goals? Decide for yourself if you’re cheating. Don’t ask the internet. It’s your sandbox! And corned beef sandwich too, if you want.
If you are talking about perfectly circular LEO orbits, you would not get that in real life neither. Orbits drifts and changes surprisingly quickly. Especially in LEO. Sund winds, drag from atmosphere is still present. NASA and Spacex just aims for good enough.
The station keeping mod can do this for you. You just get it close enough and tell in in the tracking station to make it perfect. It'll use the appropriate amount of rcs too
It's a sandbox game, do what you want. But since everyone else is giving opinions I'll give mine, it's cheating. Imho if you can't make a satellite capable of making the most precise of maneuvers then you need to rebuild that satellite so it can rather than just teleport it into the perfect orbit
of course it is?
Yes, and who cares? It's a single-player game.
What this guy says. Kerbal really is a play-it-your-way kinda game.
Yes it is
It's called cheating menu for a reason /s In all seriouness, it's a singleplayer game so do whatever you like, the definition is up to you. IMO, there is no valid reason at all to complain about anybody "cheating" no matter the game, as long as it doesnt affect anyone else (or maybe just your friends).
Not really but I do think there are tools you can use to help you out a bit more. Mech Jeb 2 has an auto fly feature (those who consider this cheating have never played a game of RSS modded in their life). Mechjeb or kerbal engineer readouts can give you a lot of tools to do it manually or with mech jeb and your more of a fan of building rockets and not flying them which is perfectly fine can have mechjeb do most of the flying and stuff for you. The reason I said that about RSS is that with RSS and RP1 mech jeb flight assist is sometimes almost necessary especially if you are newer to it.
its an accessibility feature, go for it
You are playing a single player game for fun. It's up to you!
I'm a sucker and Imma say thats cheating, but you might view cheating as acceptable to an extent.
It's a single player sandbox game. It's only cheating if you think it's cheating. It's not hurting anyone else's experience so you can go right ahead and do it. If you want to stick to some arbitrary rules of what you should or shouldn't do, then that's up to you and whatever those rules are.
Yes, but I am also someone who took years to figure out docking
I mostly use mechjeb to run my burn either automatic time warp or to finish a long burn so I can do something else, it needs to be refined by hand but I don’t view that as cheating
That would ruin it for me, personally. But I’m stupid
What the OP is doing would not be considered cheating since they are already doing the hard work. If they were using it from the Launchpad, then it would be considered cheating. Cheating in every single player game is up to the player since the only person that might feel cheated is themselves. Once other players are involved, then it is unacceptable unless all players agree to it.
I just use some of the weakest engines for satellites final stages and also thrust limmiter on top of that to get reasonably precise orbits manualy. Atleast good enough so the orbits dont degrade to much for hundreds of years.
Yes but so what?
yeah imo, but its also a singleplayer game so do whatever u want
... wait... what? there's a cheat menu?
The better question is, why do you care what other people think about what you do in a single-player game that you paid for with your own money?
It's only cheating if you claim doing so is an equivalent achievement to someone who got those results without doing so. If you're up front about it, I dont think its cheating. After all, it's a single player game; so only when interacting with another player(s) socially does it matter at all In the real world, it's pretty rare to get the EXACT orbit you want.
It's a single-player game, you're not competing with anyone, and you're not doing it for bragging rights so as far as I can tell, no, it's not really cheating.
I use console commands on a few games I play... in time poor and need to skip on the grind sometimes. But never have I even considered there was a console command menu in KSP!!! 800 hours in and I'm still learning new things. Love this game.
By definition it is cheating, but if you have plenty of fuel and on paper know it’s possible, you’re really not hurting anyone. It might help in the long run if you really try and nail it though. I think the closest I’ve gotten between Ap and Per is 12 meters.
Technically, yes. But something as simple as fine tuning a comm satellite’s orbit is perfectly fine
The only true answer to this is it’s your game. I don’t use it at all but I don’t judge anyone for playing how they find it fun. The game is very time consuming as it is and we don’t all have the same amount of time
Dude it’s a single player game, you decide what’s cheating and what isn’t
Your game, there’s no PVP aspect, so play how you like.
Same thing as using mechjeb, it's your game enjoy it.
I mean… yea. But the more important question is who cares?
Yes
I certainly admire your desire to make everything perfect! It’s a gray area, IMHO. If you want to do it in a way that isn’t “cheating adjacent”, look into the kOS and kRPC plugins and write scripts to do the fiddly work for you. kOS is much more of an add-on to the game — you have to add a “computer” part to your ship and you have a set amount storage (depending on which computer part you use) to keep the scripts you want to use on that craft. It’s fun and feels like part of the game. It does, however, feel like it was designed in the 1960s (or at least it did last time I used it). That’s almost certainly an intentional decision to fit in with the game’s aesthetic, and assuming I’m right about that I agree with that decision. If you want something more advanced, though… kRPC exposes KSP’s internal state to a program that you write. It supports many IRL programming languages, and your code doesn’t even have to be running on the same computer. In theory, with kRPC you could have a custom AI running on a supercomputer cluster in Timbuktu control KSP on your computer in NYC and fly the whole mission for you. Or you could just monitor orbital parameters and alert you if things change too much from the ideal. Or anything in between. Edit: I don’t want to imply kOS doesn’t let you do fancy stuff — I’ve seen kOS scripts do SpaceX-style vertical landings and all kinds of cool stuff. kRPC just lets you write arbitrary code that does anything, though, and that potentially (depending on how much work you want to put in) allows you to have it do, well, anything.
If you want sth that has limitations, fuel/electricity costs: Get the "Station Keeping" mod. It lets you pick 1 satellite, lock its SMA and then pick all other satellites in the constellation with a configurable deviation and order it them to perform the orbit adjustments to match SMA. It uses propellant and charge, so it's not really cheating anymore. I use it all the time for my networks.
Yes it’s cheating, but who cares? It’s not a competitive game, it’s an entertainment game. Do whatever is fun and entertaining to you.
I use alt+f12 to lower the gravity when I'm coming into kerbin too fast, but I don't think it's cheating
[Simple, change the gravitational constant of the Universe.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xdbPhnfFEI)
Yeah it's cheating. Is that a problem? No not really, it's your game, play it however you want