KSP headcanon

[Kromey]

I kinda just figured that one day they realized that space was a thing and their whole culture got a little too fascinated with it.

This is pretty much what I decided, as documented here. (That particular bit of prose was inspired by discussion/speculation on the upcoming Observatory feature, and how some were saying it would be rather unrealistic to have to use said Observatory to discover the other major planets such as Duna and Jool.)

[razark]

...this melted all the water off the surface and just left the ice.

So, the liquid water melted, but the ice was unaffected?

Fascinating.

[JakeGrey]

My take on the KSA has them as a mostly civilian organisation except possibly for Wehrner; the backstory to my fanfic series actually has Jeb as an airline pilot before he had to take over the junkyard full-time after his dad died. Haven't settled one one for the other two yet.

[Spica]

The mysterious ring of mountains on the opposite side of the planet as the big crater is the combination of the shock waves formed by the impact, shifted northward by plate tectonics.

[Xacktar]

My theory is that Kerbal's are a species of balloon-plants. They have a thin, jello-like outer skin that holds their entire bodily processes. They can absorb water and gases and store them inside their balloon bodies, while using sunlight from their radiation-sealed suits to keep themselves alive for years on the internal chamber of micro-atmosphere.

This is why they 'pop' when they die. That puff of smoke is actually the pressurized gas and water that was inside their outer skin. The expanding pressure shreds their outer body and spacesuit too fast to see.

This is why they can distend their bodies through seemingly solid objects, and can suffer insane distortions caused by the Space Kraken.

It also might explain the desolate nature of the planet, as perhaps they only take balloon shape when preparing to travel into space or when they need to interact with technology. On ground they dissolve into a green film that covers the surface, making the planet a great uniform green.

So yeah, that is my Unified Kerbal Theory.

Edited November 5, 2013 by Xacktar

[sumghai]

Everything I consider to be my personal headcanon is summarized here:

http://bit.ly/kspSumghaiWebcomicMusings

I use this to provide context for missions in my main savegame.

[Geschosskopf]

As far as i know, Squad wants to add Girlbals in the future, so when it happens you may want to re-think your head canon

Naw, it's a mistake to impute humanocentric characteristics to such alien lifeforms as Kerbals. While we might someday think some look masculine or feminine to our eyes, this has no effect on their bodily functions. That's their version of different races.

[Vaebn]

For some reason, I always felt that Kerbals live in underground cities.

Something to do with all of Kerbin being empty, yet KSC clearly being a product of industry.

I also consider the green skin photosynthetic, however because I also happen to know that photosynthesis wouldn't be able to support an active organism, I also consider them as having to eat.

However, the fact that they are smaller, plus the photosynthesis,

a) means that the amount of food they go by, is much less.

they don't like it one bit, but in an emergency, going by on pure photosynthesis is possible. That would somewhat look like hibernation.

c) as a side effect, their photosynthesis might extent their life support a bit. Their chemical metabolism uses up oxygen, yet their photosynthetic metabolism, uses up CO2. (Yet, they still need life support systems because such a process would be biased towards chemical metabolism's consumption)

I also too considered the Kerbin crater an obvious backstory as to why the Kerbals are so obsessed with space. In fact, if I may extent on that, that's precisely why the cities are underground!

Sure you can survive an epic dark ice age with nuclear reactors and stuff, but why deplete your fissiles for heating, when just by digging a Burj Dubai's worth of height down, you can have a nice, cosy, 20 C temperature?

By now they are simply used to living like that I guess.

Edited November 5, 2013 by Vaebn

[Poryy]

Post your KSP headcanon here. Headcanon on why Kerbals don't require food, what you think they eat, and how their ships work go here.

Headcanon:

Kerbal Military Power:

My theory is that Kerbals never progressed beyond basic gunpowder weaponry, and focused all of their tech onto space flight very early in their development. Evidence of this is present in rover wheels. Kerbals probably never invented treads because they have never had a war that needed tracked armored vehicles (Tanks) Kerbals are also a very peaceful species, with a variety of names suggesting a lack of nation borders. This can also be observed in-game. A kerbal named Bob can sit right next to a kerbal named Sigly. The variety of names in a single small area (KSC) displays a lack of nations on Kerbin.

Edited February 21, 2014 by Vanamonde
There was already a thread like this, Poryy, so your post was merged into it for the sake of keeping the forum tidy. :)

[DJEN]

-Jool is actually more massive than you would think. The moons are the evidence.

-Eve's oceans are apparently composed of petroleum compounds, so why not consider it a carbon planet?

-Scott Manley is right. Minmus is a somewhat recently captured asteroid that came from the outer solar system.

-There is a brown dwarf or some...object orbiting around the sun.

-Tylo lost its atmosphere due to heavy bombardment, while Laythe gained its through it.

-Jool is the "cartoon" gas giant, and Gas Giant 2 will be the "realistic" one.

-The Kraken's reproductive cycle somehow involves gas giants.

[KSK]

The Kerbal Space Program started out as a bunch of amateurs building model rockets out of stuff they found in Jeb's dad's junkyard and bootstrapped their way to successful orbits and reentries before the government started getting interested. Things progressed from there.

My take on it is a little different but yeah, pretty much this. My tentative retrofitted backstory has Jeb befriending Wernher in college, realising the potential of Wernher's prototype LV-1 rocket engine and then going a little over the top trying to sell his wild ideas of kerballed spaceflight. Frustrated at the lack of response from a generally conservative faculty, he and the rest of the Kerbin Interplanetary Society drop out of college to try and go it alone. The junkyard business was set up as a means to an end - it's a way of acquiring parts and raising cash. Other KIS members took part time jobs to pay the bills and keep themselves in food and other basics,

None of the KIS have any piloting background, which is the main reason (along with simplicity) they settled on the booster plus capsule concept for spaceflight.

Building a crew capable sub-orbital rocket was (unsurprisingly) a lot harder and took a lot longer than they anticipated and the Kerbal 1 was pretty much their last throw of the dice. By that time, only the hardcore believers of the KIS were left and they were generally regarded as 'those crazy rocket guys', narrowly managing to avoid blowing themselves up.

Then came Jeb, Bill and Bob's first flight aboard the Kerbal 1. Bill had the great presence of mind to bring a camera along and take some photos from high altitude. Kerbin's Space Age had begun...

[Thomas988]

I think the Kerbals is a civilization that, since ancient times, has been very space-centered.

[jfull]

I think the Kerbals is a civilization that, since ancient times, has been very space-centered.

I wonder what kind of mythology they had before their space age.

Did celestial bodies like Eve, Duna, and Jool represent deities to them?

[Wahgineer]

I personally believe that Kerbals are more or less analogous to humans: Sexual reproduction, two separate genders, have large cities, similar grade technology, etc. The reason being is because they're obviously based off of humans, and the game isn't exactly complete regarding the Kerbals history. I also do not believe that they are idiots using random junk to build they're rockets. I believe that they're very competent and smart engineers, which is exemplified in the Ion engine, LV-N, RAIPER, and Aerospike.

[spectrhz]

I don't think I will ever be able to take the word "headcanon" or even "canon" seriously...

[NASAFanboy]

I take mine much more differently.

The Kerbal Space Program wasn't an space program at first.

It all started after the Big War, from which the United Provinces, also known as the UP, emerged as a superpower amongst the weakened powers of the "Ol'land". Soon after the surrender, Wernher Von Kerman was captured by the UP as it advanced into enemy territory, fighting the remnants of the once powerful enemy. Although Von Kerman was first mistaken for a simple farmer, he was later identified as a rocket scientist who had worked on civilian rocketry before starting to work on jet engines for the enemy during the war.

Von Kerman was given a hefty sum of money and quickly ushered into the UP Capitol, Aseria, where he met with a lot of his former rocket team, in which after they where transferred to a coastal city to run the military rocketry research. Although underfunded, Von Kerman and his team successfully built the first supersonic airplane, followed by an suborbital sounding rocket. They would then go on to launch the first UP satellite five years later, and the rest

[Accelerando]

Kraken Drives are a real phenomenon in the KSP universe, with all that implies.

[Dangerous_Beans]

Minmus is made of ice cream! or has a core of ice cream, or is composed of in some shape or form, of ice cream.

ooh, i really want to make a Minmus inspired dessert. i'm thinking a ball of mint icecream with little chocolate chips (Minmus can't be all ice, there should be small bits of rock in it), and then coat it with white chocolate sorbet. or maybe serve it with a white chocolate fudge sauce?

wish i could think of something to do for the Mun inspired one, though Kerbin could be a mixture of mint and berry sorbets.

my head cannon is that Bill and Bob are in love, i have them write crappy love poems to each other when ever they plant flags, and that Jeb feels their behaviour detracts from the majesty of space exploration.

[Pds314]

I strongly suspect that whatever made the giant crater on Kerbin was once a captured object like Minmus probably is. I think eventually Minmus may come smashing down to Kerbin or to the Mun. Perhaps a massive Comet disintigrated above Kerbol and Minmus, as well as another part of the comet about 27 km in diameter (made of the same stuff as Minmus, hitting Kerbin). This would certainly have ended life on Kerbin, but I think Kerbals came from Eve, yes, Eve, not Laythe, several million years ago after causing extreme level of environmental destruction and ended up burning all of the oxygen in their atmosphere in a matter of hours by accident after too much rocket fuel fumes had boiled off into the atmosphere. Thus, Eve's dense and exotic sky and rocket-fuel oceans.

The colonists moved Minmus's orbit, thinking that if it were further from the Mun, it would take longer to smash into Kerbin. Over many years, they got its orbit to zero eccentricity at 47,000 km from Kerbin's surface.

Finally, They introduced Evean Flora and Fauna to Kerbin where life had gone extinct. Not knowing that they would be the sole remaining inhabitants of the solar system when Eve burned just a few hundred years later, they didn't prepare a self-sustaining colony that could grow and get cities to arise.

The ancient Eveans went to most of the places in the Kerbal system. They even founded an aquatic city on laythe and released copious amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere. They nearly killed off the monstrous Kraken that plagued space travel.

Unfortunately, when Eve burned and most of them died, the colonists were unable to set up new colonies and quickly reverted. They are thought to have died shortly thereafter, but it is possible that some made it to interstellar space or live in remote regions of planets, still waiting for a resupply ship to come and help them.

Certainly, we can't expect anything to have survived the massive impactor, not on such a small planet, so life on Kerbin must have come from outer space. If that means the solar system, then we have Duna: not likely, Laythe: could be, but probably not, or Eve: rocket fuel and nothing to burn it with. Purple. Seems very unnatural.

[jfull]

Yeah this is a pretty big bump, but I might as well bring it back (rather than start a new thread) because I have a few more ideas

-Kerbals don't actually have mealtimes like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They simply consume snacks whenever they feel like it.

-Kerbals have little-to-no violent instincts, and acts of violence are extremely foreign concepts to them. They wouldn't understand the motivations behind war if you tried to explain it to them.

-Almost all Kerbal engineers believe gremlins exist, and blame them when the craft they build fail.

Edited May 8, 2014 by jfull

[Skyler4856]

The events during KSP take place a few billion years from present day

[Tw1]

…Umm, bit of a necro? But....

Also, I think Bob is actually a rather good scientist who genuinely wants to explore, but he's just terrified of flying. (lowest stupidity of the starting 3, always seems happy once landed somewhere)

I agree, this is how I interpret his character too. If you're not a daredevil, rockets are scary. Spaceships are mostly fuel tank- explosive fuel, and if the hull is breached you might die. Or get stuck far from home scary stuff.

I could tell you exactly how I think the KSP came about. But that would be spoilers...

Edited May 8, 2014 by Tw1

[The Error]

Personally?

-Kerbals' green gives them photosynthesis. Given this isn't enough to support them, Snacksâ„¢ exist to supply essential energy and nutrients.

-Kerbals quite literally do not understand why one would need violence. At all.

-They require both genders to reproduce, but do so via spores; so the little patch of dirt on the floor at home is an upcoming kid.

-Their suits (helmets, specifically) are quantum-enhanced, rendering them reeeeaaally tough. Not so much the Kerbs themselves.

-Darker note? All kerbs tend to be a tad scatterbrained, and Jeb is actually schizophrenic. Not that it impinges on his badassitude, though.

Edited May 8, 2014 by The Error

[KerbMav]

Plants cannot live from photosynthesis alone, the only use the energy of the sunlight to build new molecules from water, carbondioxide etc. - they are no Yogis living from light and air alone.

[jfull]

Maybe the green in their skin isn't from photosynthesis in their own cells, but from symbiotic algae cells that live in their skin?