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Kerbals are immortal demigods who can warp reality.

When a Kerbal dies they come back to life during later missions. Also, they can survive what a human couldn't, like 30Gs of acceleration and falling from the edge of space on to land and bouncing. Also, when you build a ship that is unstable and crashes before it can launch, you have think how they even got the ship to the launch pad without it falling apart. Clearly the Kerbals must be able to manipulate gravity to transport these unstable ships to the launch pad, then release their grip on gravity so that the ship crashes on the launch pad while the player is looking.

  • Alternatively, they may not have powers, but it seems they are very hardy and long-lived, being able to reside in space for several decades without showing signs of aging.

Kerbals exhibit far greater strength and endurance than humans.
  • A typical Kerbal can maintain a jog all the while wearing full space gear, which by human standards weighs between 180-260 pounds on Earth. The Kerbals are presumably smaller than Humans, so the Square-Cube Law may apply.

Kerbal holidays are primarily Spanish or Mexican in inspiration, along with generic holidays.

Of course, what they mean to the Kerbals themselves is anyone's guess, but depending on how canonical the KSP Official Youtube is, they (or at least, one nationality of them) celebrate the Day of the Dead. When you consider that all presently heard Kerbal language is sped-up, reversed Spanish, it makes a bit more sense.

Kerbals are a strand of Ork.

Specifically, a strand of Gretchin without actual Orks to guide them, letting them just go nuts.

Kerbals also seem to have a lack of gender variation, which is something they share with the Orks.

They also mistranslate "Dakka" as the word for "Boosters".

It explains why their crazy contraptions manage to work without constantly exploding or falling apart more often than such craft normally should; Mekboyz pretty much have Clap Your Hands If You Believe down to a science.

The Kerbals are evolutionarily related to the Minions
Their proportions and mannerisms are similar, along with their apparent disregard for danger.
  • If one may expand on this: THEY ARE MINIONS! a Kerban space colony went wrong (Big surprise), and they some how got so lost, they wound up on earth and they got mutated by radiation on the way explaining the differences between them and Minons. The only person willing to put up and encourage there antics was Gru and mad science and there brand of rocket science are not too dissimilar.
    • also: note how excited the Minons were when they heard they were going to steal the Mun, i mean moon.
    • Expansion part is Jossed, as Word of God from side of Despicable Me states that Minions are genetically engineered from a kernel. That's not to say that some Minions somehow ended up in Kerbin.

Jool is an Evil Eldritch Location
Watch this vid starting at two minutes twelve seconds. First of all, the player's ship falls appart hundreds of kilometers above the planet for no reason at all. Then when he enters the atmosphere and gets at about 90 meters... The horror... The HORROR!! And after that! The Altimeter goes haywire and... And... Nothing.

Clearly the Benevolent Precursors put up a shield to protect the poor little Kerbals and their home system from the Horrors that await within that deceptively calm green ball. But then, Lovecraft knew of the color's malevolence back in the 30s. Or maybe it's not the color, but the type of planet itself, after all, what kind of planet doesn't have a landable surface?! And We've got four of 'em in our own system! What really destroyed the Galileo satellite?

  • Okay, but: it's Danny2462. One, he makes Kerbal Space Program break all the time, two, Jool is his arch-enemy, and is bound to be depicted as a villain.

Kerbals are somehow related to Dorfs
They're both short, prone to killing themselves in hilariously dumb ways, love !!SCIENCE!! too much for their own good, and both have the misfortune of living in worlds with massive potential for Video Game Cruelty Potential to run wild. Plus cries of "MAGMAAAAAA!" seems somewhat similar to cries of "MOOOAAAR BOOOSTERSSS!"This also handily explains why the surface of Kerbin is devoid of habitation, wildlife or trees.
The Kerbol system was designed by Magratheans.
The planets are way too small, the densities are much too high, Kerbol (Or just the Sun) is too small to be a star, Eve is purple, Jool is too small to be a gas giant, the list goes on. There can be only one explanation. Magratheans.

KSP takes place in our solar system, a billion years in the future

  • Earth/Kerbin has changed its geography due to continental drift
  • Venus/Eve and Jupiter/Jool were used as toxic waste dumps by future humanity. This changed their compositions and thus their colors.
  • Io was terraformed to become Laythe
  • Saturn and all of its moons (except for Dione, which is now called Eeloo) were obliterated by a crazy science experiment of future humanity. This event destroyed all life in the solar system except for some microbes deep down in the oceans. Life evolved again for millions of years until the Kerbal discovered spaceflight. Considering how responsible the Kerbal are when it comes to using technology, the cycle will likely repeat soon.

The Kerbals are, in some way, related to the Rabbids
At first I thought of this due to the similarities between the Kerbalites and the Rabbids, and since I never played Raving Rabbids, I thought it ended at that.

According to Rabbids Go Home, their home, or at least where they plan it to be, is the moon. A typical kerbal's mission tends to be the moon, though can shoot further once they reach it.

The Rabbid intends to reach the moon using a pile a of junk. The kerbal's first ships start looking like piles of junk, showing progress once they eschew overkill for technique.

Rabbids cannot succumb to pain, and even if the kerbal missions blow up again and again in quick succession, the next pilot usually goes in fearlessly, with the select few insane ones.

Plus, in physical similarities, the kerbals and the rabbids have eyes far apart with a wide mouth, and similar short build. When the rabbids started to evolve intelligence, their other senses, like their ears, went away as their brain size increased. They turned green because after all the crazy things the rabbids did, its possible that early chemistry made their food turn them a shade of green, similar to how silver turns humans blue.

Minmus is an egg of an Eldritch Abomination

There will be an Apocalypse Cult worshipping Jool and/or Kraken(s).
Considering all the other things that have occurred around it and the nature of its' glitchyness in universe coupled with the recent inclusion of asteroids threatening the home world on an unprecedented scale, it's only likely that some Kerbals will go right off the (deeper than deep that they're already on) end and draw their own conclusions. Namely that it is best to found a Religion of Evil dedicated to trying to "unleash" the holy Kraken Race and/or Jool for...whatever maniacal purposes the Great Green "Planet" and/or the Great Green Tentacled ones intend to do. How they will factor into the gameplay- and whether the player will stand against them or join them = is uncertain and/or up to the player, though.

The Kerbals are plants.
They're green, they have no brains, and they can apparently survive on nothing but sunlight for days on end.

The Kerbals are a subterranean species.

It can explain why there appear to be no above-surface cities or structures besides the space program's headquarters. The Asteroid update implies that Kerbin is amid a very dense asteroid field and is constantly bombarded by meteors large enough to do serious damage to the surface. Kerbin has very close encounters with class E asteroids on a yearly basis. Our real world planets very rarely have collisions that large.

The large amount of asteroid impacts explains why the Kerbals are so fascinated with space.

Cosmic events happen at a very high rate in the Kerbol system. It wouldn't be surprising if Kerbal culture and society developed a significant awareness of space very early in their evolution.

Kerbal Space Program takes place in the same universe as the board game Galaxy Trucker.

They both involve adorable little guys in spacesuits cobbling spaceships together out of spare parts which tend to go hilariously wrong. Presumably the Mission Control Center reorganizes itself into the Corporation Incorporated transportation company after interstellar travel is developed.

Gene Kerman is the smartest Kerbal.

He's arranged his life so the space program can only function if he stays on the ground.

Kerbals are fungal creatures that live on photosynthesis

It explains how they can survive in a capsule without food.

The uniformity of the Kerbal race is because of a shadowy group of Kerbal race purists...

The Ku Klux Kerbals.

Following up on two WMGs above... Kerbals are the result of an unholy union between Rabbids and Minions!
This explains the shared similarities...
  • What if Kermin is Earth in the far, far future? (Insert a certain Planet of the Apes scene here... You know the one.)
    • Given their tendency to... ahem... fail epically...

The game itself is a retelling of past events.
  • Future Kerbals know what happened, but are trying to figure out the specifics. This is the reason why the clock starts at Year 1, Day 1, Time 000. When Kerbals went to space is when Kerbal Historians agree the new calendar started. Also, the Revert button? Maybe some historian realized the events didn't make sense, so they try to figure it out again.

KSP 2 will have our own solar system as an easter egg.
The sequel will have interstellar systems. Wouldn't it be great if you could go to our own solar system, make contact with humans, get a message from one of the devs congratulating you for finding Sol, and getting some sort of reward, like in Spore?

Volcanic eruptions on any body in the Kerbol system are seriously bad news.
Planets in the Kerbol system are smaller and significantly more dense than their real world analogs. This means that the acceleration rate of gravity changes more drastically with altitude—you might even feel less gravity on a mountaintop than you would at sea level (on Earth, the effect is much more gradual). This means eruptions will spew matter not only into the stratosphere, but on globe-spaning suborbital arcs. Worse still, with that average density of Kerbin being greater than osmium, and those volcanic bombs weighing several tons hailing in from suborbital arcs—let’s just say there might be good reason to assume the Kerbals probably live underground.

The Kraken is a Pa'anuri.
We can't actually see the kraken, but it obviously still exists. The Pa'anuri are likewise invisible to the naked eye. Their method of attack (making your ship shake itself to pieces) could be done easily with the gravitic manipulation that the Pa'anuri are capable of. (In fact, it's their main way of interacting with baryonic matter.) Plus, the idea of the Kraken's tentacles being barely visible to some imminently doomed kerbals as gravitational lenses just seems like it fits. The body on Bop could be a red herring, as it is too small to adequately explain what happens to large enough crafts. It could be a large Dronuri, possibly involved in the construction of some of the easter eggs around the Kerbol system.

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