Sliding scale of cheating with some newbie-friendly initial state.
Re: discussion from 5b74f40b
The orbital lock as it is is a new Crime Against Science. Some beginners have hard time even getting into orbital lock range, and without orbital lock they apparently despair and leave. In the --cheat
mode, of course, it is easy to implement teleporting into orbit around an arbitrary body.
Also, having flavour for stuff like underclocker (see !49 maybe) would be nice to make universe alive. But putting upgrades where they make sense backstory-wise would make the game even harder for newcomers.
Maybe there should be a sliding scale of cheat-ness, which would start in the middle by default? On the honest hard SF end, orbital lock (if present) is an autopilot module to buy, and it just controls your engine and rotation to maintain an orbit that you need to reach by hand. On full-cheating end you have access to universe internals, and some helper functions to teleport/change orbit/get free money/etc.
Then you could slide into hard mode with a weaker engine and lower mining mission payoffs.
The default state could provide some of the cheats but explicitly mark them as cheating — like the current orbital lock, free underclocker, maybe even free jumps along the current orbit.