Hello everyone who is reading this. I would like to tell you about my recent encounter with the legendary space kraken.
In my opinion a lot of people nowadays who encounter this creature in the game do not come across it "naturally". What I mean by this is that these people are usually messing around with mods (hyperedit is one of the most common ways the kraken is summoned). This kind of induced attack is not what I would call "natural". My recent encounter; however, was completely natural.
For those of you who don't know about the kraken you should know that in games like ksp there are sometimes bugs. The kraken is a more specific type of bug. Based on what I can gather a normal bug is just something strange happening in a game for some reason. The kraken is a bug that is much more violent. A kraken attack can be classified by a bug or series of bugs that suddenly appear with little to no warning and often result in the total destruction of your craft in ksp. Often these series of bugs are quite interesting and strange. In the early game kraken attacks were quite common but as the game was developed further these because less frequent. One release (I can't remember which) after years of strange attacks the Devs announced that the kraken had finally been slain. To further emphasize their point they put a dead corpse of a kraken somewhere in the game (I won't say where to avoid spoilers). After this I saw no evidence that the kraken was still alive besides a video here or there where someone was messing around with hyperedit (which to be fair is just taunting this beast). For at least a year I would just encounter a normal bug here or there but nothing that really could be called the kraken. This all changed the day I wrote this post.
I was testing an SSTO design that could go to the Mun's orbit and back. I got to the Mun, got into orbit, then came back to Kerbin. I aero braked once then went in for the final desent. I was trying to land at the KSC but I overshot so I turned around and flew back towards the runway by burning some on my left over fuel in my rapier engines. I lined up almost perfectly with the runway, throttled back my engines and pitched down to bring me onto the end of the runway. About 10 seconds before I would have touched down I saw a little puff of smoke fly by my plane. I remember thinking it was strange because normally when you see puffs of smoke like that you are much higher up and they are white or grey colored. This puff was black like the kind of smoke you get from explosions. I didn't hear any explosions and the puff was really small so I thought nothing of it. About 3 seconds later (7 to landing) I saw another puff of smoke that was much the same as the first one. At the same time the smoke left my screen I heard my jet engines dying and restarting in rapid succession but I saw no sparks and at this point my throttle was at 0 so it shouldn't have mattered. Immediately after this my plane started to yaw to the left quite hard. This all took place in the time of about 1 second. I was not hitting the yaw keys and my throttles were at 0 so there was no reason for this yaw to the left. At this point I knew something was very wrong. Sudden, off in the distance, the small fuel tanks off the front of the VAB and to the side of mission control exploded for no reason. My plane was in one piece so there was no reason those tanks should have exploded. At this time I was about 5 seconds from landing so I attempted to straighten my plane out so I could land. It was also at this time it dawned on me that this was the kraken. I was messing with no mods so this was a completely natural and unprovoked attack. As soon as I thought this there was a brief lag spike and at the end of it my plane was suddenly pointed straight up for no reason. After another brief lag spike the plane jerked again and was pointed in a slightly different direction. It was at this time I though to record this so I hit the pause button. My video should be live in a day or so so I will put the link to it in a comment on this post when it is done. My plane was too low to the ground to recover from the attack so I stalled and slammed into the ground. A large part of my plane survived (unfortunately the crew was killed) and after it came to a stop it suddenly shot forward, stopped against and then just sat there and vibrated until I reverted the flight.
As you can see, this attack from the space kraken was unprovoked so it proves the kraken still lives.
The areas above where my original post but some new stuff has happened. Specifically this happened again in almost the exact same way and this time the entire thing was caught on camera. Here is my video where it took place. If you are interested I just the bugs or the kraken watch the first 3 minutes and the last 5.
