DoctorDavinci Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 (edited) 1 hour ago, LetsGoToMars! said: they don't necessarily have to be all siblings. That would mean they all share the same parents. If they all share the Kerman surname, that would mean that they are cousins to some degree. You're assuming that their naming conventions are based upon the western worlds naming conventions Let alone every human in the world is a cousin of one another to some degree Edited May 31, 2016 by DoctorDavinci Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EliasDanger Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 I don't think its fair that a kerbal is stuck with the gender they've been programmed and designed as. We should give each kerbal the option to switch to the other gender or a completely new made up gender....and let them use whatever bathroom they want! That way the game is more PC and in tune with times... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jarin Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 This is gonna have to be explicitly added to the "banned topics" list, isn't it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OrbitalBuzzsaw Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 I've no problem with it, but I wish they gave em' different last names other than Kerman! 2 minutes ago, Jarin said: This is gonna have to be explicitly added to the "banned topics" list, isn't it? It begins. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_Rocketeer Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 Careful @EliasDanger, that's the sort of talk that gets threads cleaned and locked. Actually, you know what, go wild. This thread is so banal and hollow. This whole business really says far more about each of us as players than it does about anything else. If you can't get over the male/female thing that's not the fault of the game. Girly-named kerbs have been a thing since HarvesteR was playing with fireworks (from what evidence I've seen about the web) waaaay before KSP was a thing. Did KSP need female kerbals? Probably not. Does it matter at all that it has them now? Probably not. Is there any point at all in discussing it at all? Probably not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jarin Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 It's been beaten to death ever since they were introduced. Every couple weeks another topic pops up and gets closed shortly thereafter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EliasDanger Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 1 minute ago, The_Rocketeer said: Careful @EliasDanger, that's the sort of talk that gets threads cleaned and locked. Actually, you know what, go wild. This thread is so banal and hollow. This whole business really says far more about each of us as players than it does about anything else. If you can't get over the male/female thing that's not the fault of the game. Girly-named kerbs have been a thing since HarvesteR was playing with fireworks (from what evidence I've seen about the web) waaaay before KSP was a thing. Did KSP need female kerbals? Probably not. Does it matter at all that it has them now? Probably not. Is there any point at all in discussing it at all? Probably not. Yeah, sometimes I like to be mischievous and push the boundaries a little. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waxing_Kibbous Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 2 hours ago, qromodynmc said: I dont even check who flies my plane. You'd better start, Bill is always trying to sneak onto my rockets. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cubinator Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 Kerbonauts are just spores produced by Kerbin that haven't matured yet; eventually they will grow and metamorphosize into full-grown planets which reproduce in a manner similar to flowering plants. I like having female Kerbals in my game; in my mind they have a slightly different personality than the males which makes for more interesting missions. Other than that, I don't think about romance or politics or any of those crazy problems we have in the real world. To me, KSP is a nice, little universe where everyone cares only about one thing: space. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cantab Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 1 hour ago, EliasDanger said: I don't think its fair that a kerbal is stuck with the gender they've been programmed and designed as. We should give each kerbal the option to switch to the other gender or a completely new made up gender....and let them use whatever bathroom they want! That way the game is more PC and in tune with times... This made me realise something. So far as I can tell, nowhere in the game is Kerbal sex or gender specified. We have Kerbals with masculine and feminine faces by our human standards of appearance. We know they're "meant" to be male and female, Squad have confirmed as much and it says so in the savefile, but it's never explicit in KSP itself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snark Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 Just now, cantab said: This made me realise something. So far as I can tell, nowhere in the game is Kerbal sex or gender specified. We have Kerbals with masculine and feminine faces by our human standards of appearance. We know they're "meant" to be male and female, Squad have confirmed as much and it says so in the savefile, but it's never explicit in KSP itself. Sure it is. Contracts refer to "he" and "she" for stranded kerbals that need rescuing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cantab Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 Ack. Career mode sucks and shouldn't count Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Overland Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations There are no male or female kerbals.. The fact that thier names sound gender specific is just an incorrect humanistic translation from Mr Kerbal A human scientific explorer that managed to transcend alternate universe barriers ..discovering an earth like planet and solar system like our own.. Isolated from all humanity, his sanity slipped..orbiting the planet in a decaying orbit..his craft out of fuel He named the race Kerbals, the sun Kerbol and the planet Kerbin..all after himself in an egotrip of delusion hours before his final moments One of his discoveries was that while the race seemed to be plant based fungii hybrids.. 2 seperate appearences were evident..in his own reference and understanding..he marked one as male and female However this was a mistake.. The truth being thier seperate related species living in harmony The male and female dont need eachother to reproduce at all As for poor Mr Kerbal.. As carbondioxide started to poison him from his now disabled craft.. His naming of things grew more hurried Busy taking down everything as his capsule rapidly heated.. Names became muffled screams.. Roasting as his capsule was lost in the reentry fires His last names..engulfed in screams were of the nearby planets Duna!! Minmus! DRES!! Eeelooooooo! And Bang Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FungusForge Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 (edited) 38 minutes ago, cubinator said: To me, KSP is a nice, little universe where everyone cares only about one thing: space. At their core, what I consider the "SQUAD Kerbals" are just this. Unified, utopian, and pacifistic little guys that just wish to explore the cosmos. They are the basic essentials for a space-faring culture. I think this should remain. Because some of you may not think on it too often, but the blank slate the Kerbals are is one of the greatest freedoms we have. I don't think the essence of SQUAD Kerbals should be any more developed than they already are. Whether they behave more human or more Kerbal should be up to the individual player. Edited May 31, 2016 by FungusForge Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ruiluth Posted May 31, 2016 Author Share Posted May 31, 2016 1 minute ago, Overland said: One of his discoveries was that while the race seemed to be plant based fungii hybrids.. 2 seperate appearences were evident..in his own reference and understanding..he marked one as male and female However this was a mistake.. The truth being thier seperate related species living in harmony The male and female dont need eachother to reproduce at all I read about a number of dinosaurs that were originally thought to be separate species but later were discovered to be two different sexes of the same species. This would just be the reversal of that. Just now, FungusForge said: At their core, what I consider the "SQUAD Kerbals" are just this. Unified, utopian, and pacifistic little guys that just wish to explore the cosmos. They are the basic essentials for a space-faring culture. I think this should remain. Because some of you may not think on it too often, but the blank slate the Kerbals are is one of the greatest freedoms we have. I don't think the SQUAD Kerbals should be any more human than they already are. Whether they behave more human or more Kerbal should be up to the individual player. That was my original thoughts as well, why I thought distinguishing kerbals (into professions and experience levels as well as genders) should be left up to modders. 4 minutes ago, EliasDanger said: *sigh* yeah...this shoulda been closed and locked awhile ago, lol. I agree, I wasn't expecting this many people to latch onto this thread. Now I wish I could lock or close it but I guess I can't do that... Clearly I'm not really used to how forums work yet Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BebopRebop Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 Kerbal spacecraft have to have segregated bathrooms because Jeb always leaves the seat up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NateDaBeast Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 I don't recruit female kerbals because females don't like me in real life. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geschosskopf Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 4 hours ago, ruiluth said: I think it would have been better to keep the kerbals gender-neutral and avoid all this. Agreed. I have always lumped Kerbal gender into the same irrational, emotional clot of humanocentric woolly thinking that demands everything in KSP be just like on Earth in the totally misguided belief that this would be "more realistic". Just as the tiny KSP universe cannot exist under our laws of physics but has patently different physical laws of its own. so are Kerbals alien beings with utterly unknown biology. They're not even made out of the same chemical elements as we are, so imposing humanocentric biology on them is just ridiculous. All this should be intuitively obvious to anybody with sufficient interest in science to own KSP in the first place, but even so there's a vocal section of the community that continually agitates for all this illogical, inappropriate humanocentric stuff. And unfortunately Squad keeps giving in to them. Gendered Kerbals is one result of this. The net result of all this is to decrease the freedom of players to envision and play KSP however they want. Every so-called "realism" feature, including Kerbal gender, constrains everybody to play the game on more and more similar lines. This IMHO is exactly the wrong way to go. A fundamental principle of KSP is to give players the freedom to do what they want, so why does Squad keep taking that away? There have long been mods to do all the so-called "realism" things (including female Kerbals). Leaving them as mods makes 99% of the community happy. The only people who aren't happy that way are those who are not only overly humanocentric, but also excessively egocentric. You know, the folks who think their way of playing is superior to all others and want to force everybody else to play their way. But anyway, we're now stuck with female Kerbals. I have not allowed this to intrude on my game canon, however. In my universe, Kerbals are still asexual fungi that reproduce by spores when they die. There are just multiple strains of fungi, more like human races than human genders. But it's really a bother having to deal with something I didn't want to have to deal with. One of the beauties of KSP being totally alien is that it allows you to leave all the messy human problems (many of which are gender-related) behind for a while. I resent being reminded of them now when I play KSP. If there was a mod to neuter all Kerbals, I'd be all over it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ruiluth Posted May 31, 2016 Author Share Posted May 31, 2016 2 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said: If there was a mod to neuter all Kerbals, I'd be all over it. This Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
numerobis Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 Whee, the debate goes on! I do like that the conservative option now is to just have female kerbals, because why remove that feature. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yorshee Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 I've said it before and I'll say it again: the male Kerbals, even before the females were added, are obviously meant to be male. They have receding hairlines, square jaws, and masculine names. I'm sure it wasn't Squad's intention, it probably just...kinda happened. Male is seen as the default gender, after all. As a female myself it always irks me when that happens so I was glad to see female Kerbals introduced into the game. They're very well-designed! Reading the devblog for the female Kerbal's design process was interesting and I'm happy with how they turned out Probably one of my favourite examples of female aliens in any form of media I've seen. As to the people who say that the male Kerbals don't adhere to humankind's naming conventions and they're all genderless blobs...I think you're reading into it way too much When it comes down to it, Kerbals are just silly cartoony replacements for humans (the game would be pretty morbid with humans involved after all...) I doubt Squad put that much thought into their culture. You can have your headcanons and theories but using them as 'evidence' as to why the female Kerbals shouldn't exist is kind of silly. Sure they're silly cartoony little green people but having female Kerbals is cool! It shows that we can be just as silly and cartoony as our male counterparts Just my two cents... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vanamonde Posted May 31, 2016 Share Posted May 31, 2016 1 hour ago, ruiluth said: ... Now I wish I could lock or close it but I guess I can't do that... Clearly I'm not really used to how forums work yet The OP can request to have his/her thread closed by PMing a moderator or posting in this thread. Since that appears to be your wish, though, I will close it now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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