How competent are kerbals?

[Kevin Kyle]

Kerbals = space cannon fodder.

[MrOsterman]

12 hours ago, Panzerbeard said:

I see Kerbals as being similar to Bloody Stupid Johnson. Everything they build works, they're just not entirely sure how or why, and it doesn't necessarily do what they originally intended. They're extremely good at coming up with wildly over-engineered problems that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

They're not stupid, just intelligent in a rather convoluted way, with the exception of the occasional oddball like Jeb. Jeb's just daft.

So..... Gnomes?

[Shamus6200]

My wife refers to Kerbals as 'moldy Minions'.  I think it's pretty accurate.

 

Edited December 22, 2015 by Shamus6200

[r_rolo1]

Well, I do see things a lot diferent of everyone else in here, I guess ... to me Kerbals are more advanced than humans. See, their parts have 100% reliability as long as you don't push out of the envelope and they were able to make a reentry worthy capsule out of paper products as their first space program part ( see the Mk1 capsule description ). Or the trees in Kerbin are made of tungsten or there is some seriously advanced paper making technologies there

[The Optimist]

Considering that their planet only has 3 species (Kerbals, grass, and trees), they've got to be pretty advanced to have done so.

 

Now I'm imagining that Kerbals are genocidal fascists. Uh oh

[Inverurie Jones]

4 hours ago, The Optimist said:

Considering that their planet only has 3 species (Kerbals, grass, and trees), they've got to be pretty advanced to have done so.

 

Now I'm imagining that Kerbals are genocidal fascists. Uh oh

Yeah. We never find out what happened to all the non-Kerbal animal life on Kermin.

'Mweh! Furting gurty nyurt-wurt*!'

DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA

 

 

*'Hey! This planet is Kerbals-only!'

[mythbusters844]

Bac9 gave a fairly good comment about the matter in his KSC devblog, and I agree with him wholeheartedly:

Quote

It’s not Kerbal? *shrug* For some reason some people like to think Kerbals are sloppy engineers only capable of producing inherently broken designs held together by duct tape. To them, proposing something prim and proper like a NASA VAB could be built by Kerbals is ridiculous. Well, I disagree. Take a good look at the parts: at the LV-N engine, at the 3-man pod, at the landing legs, at the ion engine. Those are cleanly executed pieces of impressive technology. Kerbals are indifferent to safety precautions and are very excited about explosions, yes, but they make an impression of extremely capable and very competent engineers. Sure, we know they probably turned a construction crane into a vomit carousel or raced on bulldozers in the process, but I don't doubt for one second they can build buildings similar to real ones, and I don't think it would be out of character for them. Plenty of other stuff like engines is fairly close to how our human rockets look. It's unfair to mistake Kerbals for orks from a “Certain Universe With 40k In The Name,” or to expect them to build sloppy duct-taped huts.

Overall, I'm convinced the obsession with disasters and perception of Kerbals as worthless engineers only caring about explosions is destructive for the game. KSP deserves much more than being a glorified disaster simulator where rockets falling apart and crews being killed is the prime entertainment and the only expected result. The achievements of players who strive to be successful, who create beautiful, well-engineered, reliable designs, should never be devalued, and the opinion that going to space is impossibly hard deserves to be crushed and disproved over and over again. Kerbals are capable engineers and it's up to the player to utilize their technology well.

This same mindset is harming the game in many other areas as well. The bugs of the physics system aren't there because we thought they would be fun and don't deserve to be defended as some players surprisingly do. The achievements of reaching orbit, landing on another body or even establishing a permanent base somewhere should not be perceived as something impossibly hard and unreachable for anyone but hardcore players. Everything is possible if you are willing to learn and there is no reason to restrict yourself to playing a disaster simulator with rocket cars or insta-exploding space planes. Justifying that to yourself by creating a certain mental image of Kerbal engineers competency might make the game better for you but I’m striving for a greater Kerbal good.

Now, I'm not opposed to having fun at all. For instance, I have nothing against the KSP trailers made by our Pixar-tier magician Daniel Rosas which often depict Kerbals ignoring safety and having good fun. Part of the charm of KSP is the opportunity to take enormous risks, ignore established paradigms and experiment freely, which can often lead to great successes and interesting stories to tell. That is not clashing in the slightest with the fact that you have nice, cleanly made, technologically impressive spacecraft parts available to you, or well-built buildings to assemble your creations in - all without any sign of duct tape, rust or sloppy welding. So, basically, I feel objects in the game should continue to be clean and well-built to be consistent with the existing art style, and I'm convinced reinforcing the widespread opinion of Kerbals being incompetent is very harmful for the game. So there you have it.
 

Edited December 22, 2015 by mythbusters844

[problemecium]

I've always jut been of the opinion that their priorities are markedly different from ours. For instance:
- They obviously care a LOT more about space exploration than we do, to the degree that the plurality of their architecture on Kerbin's surface is devoted to the space industry. Then again, if their civilization is mainly underwater of underground this may be a biased sample.
- They invested in huge, powerful reaction wheels far beyond what we humans actually put on our spacecraft.
- They aren't big on efficiency or cost-effectiveness nearly as much as they are concerned with structural overengineering. The fuel tanks, notably, have terrible mass ratios thanks to thick walls able to survive impacts of anywhere from 6 m/s to 50 m/s against solid concrete (that's 21-180 km/h or 13-112 mph). 6 m/s seems slow to us as players, but the vast majority of human rockets couldn't handle a sidelong impact of that magnitude.

So they're not really stupid or insane. They're just extraterrestrials who developed their culture on a different planet and thus think very differently from the way we do.

[Tw1]

I think they are pretty smart, just prone to improvisation, and re-using stuff. They like to do things by trial an error. What they have mastered so far is the result of random testing, as much as it is their knowledge of the universe, which is why their technology levels are so patchy.

They are clever, and can do amazing things when they want, but their prevailing attitude is 'why spend time making a new fuel tank when this big silo with a new coating will work just as well?"

[Nightshift83]

On 22.12.2015 at 0:51 AM, mythbusters844 said:

Bac9 gave a fairly good comment about the matter in his KSC devblog, and I agree with him wholeheartedly:

Since they called their homestar in line with their home planet, one could assume that Kerbals knew right from the beginning about their heliocentric system. 

If not they at least knew about some sort of correlation and did not just make up some religious character to worship.

Maybe that's why they value 'science' so much that they are willing to sacrifice themselfes easily for the progression of their people.

Instead of getting tangled up in big scale wars wasting resources and lifes they dedicate themselfes to become a spacefaring race. 

How long did it take your Kerbals to land on Mun or Duna and who knows when we might reach Mars.

Where could we have been now, 47 years after the first Mun Moon landing. After realizing we were technically able to, did we push any further? 

I say we backed out like chicken, because it was easier to spend the money on the same things we'd spent it on all those centuries berfore.

For when calamity strikes Kerbals will be the ones colonizing other planets, there are even reports of them reaching for other stars, so I heard.

 

Don't let their cute little looks fool you they will allways be ahead of us because of their spirit and attitude.

 

P.s.: If someone is going to argue about their military spending - thats just to defeat the Space Kraken and if they meet a species like us, as we would surely accuse them of abduction and such nonsense..

 

(Well maybe I got carried away here a little bit.. haven't had much sleep last night

[MatttheCzar]

Really depends on my piloting skills.  I once sent Val out of my low orbiting münlab, sent her on a course that brought her mere inches from the ground, then rendevoued with the station in an eva.

...soon after my station collided with a canyon wall.  It was a 5900 km orbit...

[RocketSquid]

I see kerbals as goofy in general, but reasonably competent when it comes to spaceflight. They are certainly silly, and maybe not terribly observant (Justification: Found Mun shortly before starting a space program), but they are generally intelligent but without common sense or, in many cases (Jeb), self preservation.