Even more "kerbal" than the Kerbals themselves are?

[Ryu Gemini]

If anyone has watched that Rabbids Invasion series (hey, its actually better than the games), maybe you've had a similar thought to mine. 

 

That the Rabbids have a space program that is even more "kerbal" than the actual Kerbals do.  Hell, they may even be more kerbal than those warhammer orks (you know, the ones who somehow build interstellar spacecraft out of wood and scrap metal, and basically just crash them wherever they need raw materials to build surface warfare buildings).  Typical rabbid designs appear to use things like modified fire extinguishers in place of rocket nozzles.  Instead of a runway, one of their launch systems is basically a curved ramp built of 2-by-4s. 

 

Anywho, the rabbits apparently have a fascination with the moon.  This is actually the focus of a number of episodes.  One of the arguably more successful ones being the following. 

 

Ignoring the rather cartoony nature of things (including some toon physics, and some nonsense like that weird asteroid belt), it is remarkable just how, well, KERBAL these rabbids are. 

 

It kind of makes me wish there were a a Rabbid Space Program mod.  Though I suppose there would be some potential licensing issues there...

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[razark]

1 hour ago, Ryu Gemini said:

...a space program that is even more "kerbal" than the actual Kerbals...

Oh, yay.

 

Because the "craptastic aesthetic" is something that needs more encouragement...

[Ryu Gemini]

I meant more with regards to the way people like Randal uses the word "kerbal" as an adjective. 

In his case, he uses it to describe the concept of... well, this. 

https://what-if.xkcd.com/139/

You cannot argue that it would be quite kerbal to stick a heat shield on a submarine, and drop it into jupiter's atmosphere. 

The rabbids seem to base their entire "space program" on that sort of style.  Mixed of course with a hefty dose of "there is no way that would EVER work in reality." 

At the very least, they need more struts. 

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[FungusForge]

3 hours ago, razark said:

Oh, yay.

 

Because the "craptastic aesthetic" is something that needs more encouragement...

It shouldn't be expressed as all that the game is, but it shouldn't be shunned either. When you first started, how many craft collapsed because they didn't have enough struts, or was unstable and flipped? How many Kerbals were left stranded in solar orbit because of a botched Mun mission?

Failure and absurd rocketry is as much a part of the KSP experience as anything else.

[razark]

6 minutes ago, FungusForge said:

Failure and absurd rocketry is as much a part of the KSP experience as anything else.

I was referring more to the fact that way too many parts descriptions talk about being found in junkyards and on the side of the road, and the extent to which some players seem to think this is a "good idea".

 

Failure is what it is, and it will happen.

Building rockets out of trash is just plain stupid.  Perhaps that's not what the OP got from the video, but it's pretty much what I saw.

[Zeiss Ikon]

No matter how many KSP parts are described as coming from junkyards or along the side of the road, they look reasonably aerospace and you have to load a mod to make them fail occasionally, in the absence of poor design/construction of the completed vessel.  Once I unlock enough heavy rocketry parts, I can make a rocket that is a reasonable approximation of a Titan, Atlas, even a Soyuz, with stock parts, and have it perform in a predictable way.  The "kerbal way" of using huge numbers of strap-ons, asparagus staging, "moar struts", and so forth is mainly fostered by a combination of a viral esthetic (preserved in hundreds of YouTube videos from the early versions of the game) and limitations of having to attempt missions your tech isn't really ready for in order to get the science to upgrade your tech.

Play a sandbox game, and you don't have to "kerbal" stuff (much).  Play science, or more so career, and you wind up having to use methods like explosive decoupling, or using a stage as a heat shield, to (for instance) make a Munar flyby with first and second tech level parts (because you don't yet have decouplers, heat shields, etc.).  This is further enforced by the order some tech appears in the tree -- NASA had fuel cells before they had solar panels adequate for large loads, they used explosive bolt decoupling on the very first Redstone manned launches (and even earlier, in the first orbital attempts and for the first ICBMs).  They had primitive cold-gas RCS on the X-15 and the Mercury capsules (first flights in early 1960s), but didn't use reaction wheels (as far as I know) until they started putting large telescopes into orbit in the 1970s.  Men flew supersonic aircraft for more than a decade before the first rocket took a human into space.

Rabbids are just fun.  Their approach to technology is just silliness, created for pure amusement.  Kerbals do what they must to get the job done, including (from time to time) using inappropriate tech because they aren't yet allowed/able to use the proper parts.  Often, it's a lesson in "outside the box" thinking, as well as in the real science of spaceflight.

[Mikki]

I guess "Bwaa-Bwaa"`s pants would serve as flag on their... crash... location...

[Meteor Kerman]

Wow, I didn't know anything could get Kerbalier than Kerbals. 

[Vanamonde]

As this thread is about another game, it has been moved to the off-topic Lounge. 

[Guest]

I hereby demand "Kerbal" to become an actual adjective on our dictionaries.