Do you Cheat?

[Qumefox]

As for AP12, it sounds like something that could be handled the same way as adjusting AP11's landing location, but since I've never seen a writeup on the AP12 landing, I can't really say either way.

I highly suggest reading up on the apollo and LEM guidance computers. They weren't nearly as advanced as you're indicating you think they are. They mostly just controlled the decent profile. The only real input the LEM guidance computer had was knowing 'which way was up' via the inertial gyro's, and altitude via a radar altimeter.

All LEM traversing in the horizontal plane was done manually. The astronauts had basic functions equivalent to altitude hold, etc, to control throttle but there was no such thing as reprogramming guidance to 'land over there for me instead' mid flight. Especially considering the guidance computer programming was hard wired... literally.. Since it used rope memory.

Most people in this day and age can't fathom that those computers had less processing power than most digital watches now days.

Edited June 12, 2013 by Qumefox

[Eric S]

I have one particular pilot friend who tells a story about a passenger saying, "So you don't really do much of the flying nowadys, right? You guys got autopilot--it's the one flying the plane-" My pilot friend interrupted and said, "Actually, I FLY the aircraft USING the autopilot."

Now that's a comment I can get behind completely :-) I tend to use autopilots as tools, and tweak them as necessary, sometimes even far more than necessary. I still haven't found a docking autopilot that I trust to do more than individual pieces of the docking maneuver. An autopilot can kill relative velocity FAR more accurately than I can, and when you're docking hundred ton mothership parts, that can be rather important.

As for the rest, it really comes down to "at what point does fly-by-wire get so advanced it's closer to autopilot than direct control?" Stock KSP is a lot closer to direct control than the kinds of fly-by-wire and computer assisted stuff the astronauts use, even back in the Apollo era. That's what I mean by overly romanticized. Flying a rocket based spacecraft has never been anything like flying a plane. In fact, that's one of the reasons Chuck Yeager passed when the Mercury program started up. He knew that the astronauts would be more passenger than pilot, and he wasn't interested in that experience.

On the actual topic of the thread, the closest I come to cheating is hyperediting ships places to test them before I go through the effort of launching them and hauling them half way across the star system, and letting mechjeb keep the little maneuver marker where it's supposed to be. Oh, and as I said above, killing relative velocity while docking. Landing in kethane fields that aren't near the equator (I'll admit that my piloting skills aren't up to precise landings, especially if the planet's rotating fast enough that I have to take that into account).

[ouion]

i use part clipping so is that cheating and i don't think so

[NuclearWarfare]

I don't even know what the debug menu looks like. I have never cheated besides using mechjeb once when I first started.

[Brabbit1987]

-.-

First of all, to all those who say it's not possible to cheat in single player, you are wrong. If you do anything that game didn't originally intend, it's cheating. Using glitches is cheating. Using mechjeb is cheating. Using certain mods is cheating. Using hyperedit is cheating. However, People should be able to play the game however they like. Some people don't consider it cheating because it suits their needs and they don't want to think that is what they are doing. Some need to just learn and admit, "Yes, I cheated." It's not a big deal. It's single player, so cheating effects no one but yourself.

Those who use justifications for cheating are also wrong. "I know how to fly it already so I use mechjeb because I already know I can do it." Convenient isn't it. It's still cheating though. Remember, the game was not intended to be able to auto pilot. Again, it's single player, so who cares if you cheat.

Those who argue realism, I have got news for you. This isn't real! It's the matrix. XD Course I mean it's a game. You have little green men on a planet called Kerbin. Arguing realism at this point is kinda silly.

I like to think of cheating on a sort of scale. Convenient cheating is when you cheat for convenience. You already know how to do this particular task but don't want to do it over and over again so you cheat to skip it. Rule cheats are those who don't like how the current game works so they change the mechanics of the game a bit to suit their needs on how they want to play. Mechjeb would fall into that category when using it all the time. Then there are CHEATS, these are the type of cheats where you are able to skip all game mechanics (aka god mode). Hyperedit falls under that category.

Do I cheat? Yes, I do. Why? Because I can. I think that is the only reason I need. Do I do it all the time? No. I fall under convenient cheating in KSP. Though in other games I have used god mode and many other cheats in the past. It really all depends on what I am in the mood for.

No one has any right to tell me what I can and can't do in the video games I play. I play them how I like, end of story. I do at least strive to do things with out cheating most of the time :3. That is good enough for me.

Edit: Oh btw ... saving isn't cheating it's part of the game.

Edited June 12, 2013 by Brabbit1987

[ninjaADude]

When I first started I cheated a ton, now I'm totally legit aside from the occasional MechJeb usage.

[sporkafife]

I must admit to using "hack gravity" from the debug menu to test the RCS balance of my final stage spacecraft so they don't spaz out with ASAS on during docking. I guess this would be considered cheating by some people, but I don't want to launch 20 iterations of the same craft just to test RCS port placement

[rodion_herrera]

I must admit to using "hack gravity" from the debug menu to test the RCS balance of my final stage spacecraft so they don't spaz out with ASAS on during docking. I guess this would be considered cheating by some people, but I don't want to launch 20 iterations of the same craft just to test RCS port placement

It's a tool--why would it be considered cheating? You mean using WIND TUNNELS (which basically allow us to test if an aerospace vehicle would actually fly well) or riding the Vomit Comet is CHEATING? "Hack Gravity" is simply a large "Vomit Comet"...it's a tool to test your design. I don't see it as cheating.

[Eric S]

The astronauts had basic functions equivalent to altitude hold, etc, to control throttle but there was no such thing as reprogramming guidance to 'land over there for me instead' mid flight.

Agreed, you're misunderstanding me if you think I'm saying they had a "land over there" function on their autopilot. They used the functionality they had to alter the trajectory of the landing. They changed the attitude to vertical so that their thrust wouldn't slow down their horizontal velocity, then let their equivalent of ASAS handle that, and they keyed in a specific rate of descent (KSP's closest analog would be MechJeb's translatron, I think). At that point, they weren't following the planned trajectory, but they weren't flying the craft in the way a stock KSP player would be, either.

Most people in this day and age can't fathom that those computers had less processing power than most digital watches now days.

As someone who first started programming with 256 bytes of RAM, less than even the Block I AGC had, I understand (admittedly, that one was a lot fewer chips, since they were LSI or even VLSI). What they had was nothing like MechJeb as a whole, just functionality that matched a few parts of it.

[Mars90000000]

I don't use any mods (like hyperEdit or MechJeb). the only mods I have are additional parts, but even that, not that often.

However, I do use the debug tools provided. In fact, I use the debug options way more than I care to admit

[FlamedSteak]

MechJeb isn't cheating, but it certainly lessens the achievement.

I personally don't use it, I love this game because of the challenge not because of the outcome. And mechjeb takes away part of that challenge.

[rodion_herrera]

They used the functionality they had to alter the trajectory of the landing.

If a commercial airline pilot is landing on a runway equipped with ILS, he can opt for an autoland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland). Now, when in this state, the autoland system merely follows the glidepath all the way to touchdown as indicated in the ILS/glidescope. It is however, possible for the pilot to intervene in the process at any time during the approach by flicking a switch. If he opted to intervene, certain "automated" items are still on, mainly, the autothrottle, to make sure that the pilot doesn't put the aircraft's descent in jeopardy by manipulating the throttle to the point that the descending aircraft goes out of its current flight envelope. The original argument here was if the astronauts were piloting the LM on landing or not, and based on the airliner example, they are indeed piloting the LM at that point, even though there were merely "deviating" from the original course (which is parallel to when a pilot flicks off a switch to turn off autoland, yet the ILS "path" is still active and autothrottles are still active). But instead of their "joystick" directly hooked up to the RCS, it was merely hooked up to a digital-fly-by-wire system (which eventually got adapted by airliners, and Neil Armstrong had a hand in this, read the story here http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-024-DFRC.html) that in turn, was hooked up to the PGNS which had the navigation/landing data or "ILS" for the moon landing. So again (esp. if you read that account on DFBW), I hope this convinces you that the last few hundred feet during the LM landings, were in fact done manually using DFBW, by the astronauts.

Now going back to whatisthisidonteven's original statement:

"...also, astronauts are trained to fly their spacecraft manually, as has been done several times. The Moon landing was done manually, for one..."

He is in fact, quite correct--an astronaut can even pilot the Saturn V stack all the way up to orbit MANUALLY, if the AGC conked out. This was confirmed by an interview with Gene Cernan (AP17) in "In the Shadow of the Moon", when he said he dared the AGC to quit on him, because he felt that he practiced the ascent so many times, he could do the ascent manually with confidence and precision. So there were in fact, instances during the Apollo flights, that were quite "KSP-ish"

[CobraA1]

I don't use anything that I would consider to be unrealistic/impossible in real life, or that would upset the balance of the game. But I do use MechJeb and some other mods to make life easier.

[MR4Y]

He is in fact, quite correct--an astronaut can even pilot the Saturn V stack all the way up to orbit MANUALLY, if the AGC conked out. This was confirmed by an interview with Gene Cernan (AP17) in "In the Shadow of the Moon", when he said he dared the AGC to quit on him, because he felt that he practiced the ascent so many times, he could do the ascent manually with confidence and precision. So there were in fact, instances during the Apollo flights, that were quite "KSP-ish"

Yeah, but what people miss on when condemning Mechjeb is how utterly complicated the real thing is. Not even Orbiter comes closer to in in complexity and it has 12 years of experience as a space simulator being developed. As for the piloting manually thing, I don't think this happens today. rocket's have become way too complex for the human brain to wrap their heads around it.

[Eric S]

He is in fact, quite correct--an astronaut can even pilot the Saturn V stack all the way up to orbit MANUALLY, if the AGC conked out.

And where did I say they couldn't? What I said was that when people hold up the Apollo 11 moon landing as a triumph of man over automation, there was more automation going on there than they realize.

[The Deep Space Kraken]

You can't cheat in a sandbox singleplayer game with no specific objectives.

[John FX]

I regard things that can be done using the physics engine of KSP by putting fuel into engines, carrying payloads and so forth to be not cheating. Hyperedit is cheating.

To those who say mechjeb is cheating, I say quicksave is cheating more. Personally I use both but regard quicksave as more of a cheat than mechjeb because you can get a flight computer in real life (The shuttle for example) but you cannot quicksave so mechjeb is more `real` and therefore less of a cheat.

The only way you really could be said to be cheating in a sandbox game is if you avoid abiding by the rules of a challenge.

By that definition, no I do not cheat.

Oh, and what bubba said (and others)

[John FX]

I must admit to using "hack gravity" from the debug menu to test the RCS balance of my final stage spacecraft so they don't spaz out with ASAS on during docking. I guess this would be considered cheating by some people, but I don't want to launch 20 iterations of the same craft just to test RCS port placement

There is a hack gravity option for testing landers?!?!!

*runs to test landers*

[Astronomer]

I use quicksaves, which for one, I consider as a cheat in itself (especially restart), so I don't really use that often.

Even though I am a hardcore gamer, I like to use mods that make the gameplay more saturated with new gaming mechanics. For example: KAS, Kethane, B9, etc.

Using cheats/aiding systems (like MechJeb) would make the game too easy and pointless for me. I prefer doing it by-eye as I don't see extra information as being necessary or fun to "play" with.

In other words, I rather play without map view (like we used to) than use cheats.

[rodion_herrera]

And where did I say they couldn't? What I said was that when people hold up the Apollo 11 moon landing as a triumph of man over automation, there was more automation going on there than they realize.

Yes, but the tone you had was at downplaying the manual aspect of it. *shrugs* at least that was my impression, since you were clearly siding against what many believed to be a fully manual procedure. But for truce, let's draw the line at 50-50. If you think that manned maneuvering wasn't a priority, then you'd have to explain why they had to make the LLRV and the LLTV.

[Spyritdragon]

I try to play reasonably realistic - i'll do things that normal computers could do, but i don't put ships into orbit without burning through the atmosphere fairly. I don't even use "end flight" unless im on Kerbin's surface, except on rare occasions. When my astronauts get stranded, i strive to rescue them by ship. I do use time warp, it'd be silly not to.

I do allow myself to use the anti-gravity from the debug menu and similar functionality on a seperate savefile, for example when someone has modelled a stardestroyer or a tie-fighter, but it doens't work in normal Kerbin gravity, and i want to actually fly it around.

[Brabbit1987]

Yes, but the tone you had was at downplaying the manual aspect of it. *shrugs* at least that was my impression, since you were clearly siding against what many believed to be a fully manual procedure. But for truce, let's draw the line at 50-50. If you think that manned maneuvering wasn't a priority, then you'd have to explain why they had to make the LLRV and the LLTV.

Manual or automatic doesn't matter. Most if not all procedures are now done automatic since it's more accurate. Even cars are starting to do everything for you.

The point the other person was trying to make though is that most if not all procedures are not done manually, there is more done with auto pilot. That is a fact no matter how much you argue it. However, to me the argument is pointless to begin with since we are talking about real life here, which does not equal a video game.

If you want to know my views on what I thinking cheating is, go back to my last post. Either way, cheating or not ... it's a single player game, so it makes very little difference.

[JaySmoka]

No cheating. Only mechjeb

[rodion_herrera]

Manual or automatic doesn't matter. Most if not all procedures are now done automatic since it's more accurate. Even cars are starting to do everything for you.

The point the other person was trying to make though is that most if not all procedures are not done manually, there is more done with auto pilot. That is a fact no matter how much you argue it. However, to me the argument is pointless to begin with since we are talking about real life here, which does not equal a video game.

If you want to know my views on what I thinking cheating is, go back to my last post. Either way, cheating or not ... it's a single player game, so it makes very little difference.

My point is that there are indeed people willing to argue with that (esp. pilots themselves), and in fact it can be an important real world situation, esp. in a real world LEGAL situation, because in case an airliner crashes, you now effectively have two things to blame (if it was not caused by some other external factor)--was it the pilot's fault or the autopilot's fault?

[Brabbit1987]

My point is that there are indeed people willing to argue with that (esp. pilots themselves), and in fact it can be an important real world situation, esp. in a real world LEGAL situation, because in case an airliner crashes, you now effectively have two things to blame (if it was not caused by some other external factor)--was it the pilot's fault or the autopilot's fault?

When it comes to logical, strength, and accuracy, machines are better. Do machines ever have faults? Yes, however far less then a human.

Would you rather be out in space with a human pilot controlling every single movement or a computer controlling every single movement? I will pick the computer every time. I feel safer that way. Also you can solve the above problem by getting rid of the manual pilot entirely. Course I don't think we are there yet, but in the future I think this would be the best solution.