KSP Gods?

[ZooNamedGames]

5 hours ago, klgraham1013 said:

How dare you claim the Kraken as fictitious mythology!  Beware!  If one day, very soon, you encounter a not-so-random explosion or spaghettified Kerbal, you only have yourself to blame!

*sniff* I smell fire here. Moderators beware.

[Findthepin1]

Well, for there to have been gods, there has to have been a history. A backstory. What is the entire story of the Kerbals?

[Alshain]

5 hours ago, Findthepin1 said:

Well, for there to have been gods, there has to have been a history. A backstory. What is the entire story of the Kerbals?

Which really isn't possible since on day 1 of year 1 of all creation we start lobbing rockets and the Mun.

[something]

Moho is a brand of MOtorbike HOtels. As Moho has the shortest orbital period of all planets and hence appears to be the fastest it is kind of obvious why Squad chose that name.

Eve might be named after the European Venus Explorer (EVE) a proposed space probe.

Duna is the Hungarian name of the ruver Danube. Considering that Mars was thought to bear rivers that choice is actually quite comprehensive. (Themse,  Ebro or Rhin might have been too obvious...)

Jool is a (Mexican?) IPv4 IPv6 translation software for linux. Considring that Jool was the 4th planet at the time of implementation and that the system consisted of 4 moons (at the time of implementation) and now contains 6 celestial bodies is reason enough to take that in-joke for granted. (jool.mx)

Edited August 18, 2016 by something

[Matuchkin]

On 18/08/2016 at 0:13 PM, Findthepin1 said:

Well, for there to have been gods, there has to have been a history. A backstory. What is the entire story of the Kerbals?

First, there was god.

Then, the god created the universe and all of kerbalkind (etc,etc).

Almost instantly, a small rocket went to the edge of the atmosphere, another rocket reached orbit, another rocket went to the moon, ten more rockets sent probes all over the inner planets, Kerbals started their first colonization flight to Duna, etc, all in consecutive order, one after the other. Within a day, there were manned and unmanned flights heading towards every destination in the Kerbol system.

"Dammit", said god, "I thought I removed the revert flight function, and made time move in editors."

[Geschosskopf]

On 8/17/2016 at 5:57 AM, AlphaWest said:

I have been thinking and realized KSP has ancient gods, maybe from an older civilization.

In my universe, Kerbals evolved in tunnels deep underground so didn't even know the sky and space existed until relatively recently.  As such, throughout their Paleo- and Mesolithic periods, they thought the totality of the universe was the insides of Kerbin, which meant they lacked the usual 3-tiered cosmology (Over-, Middle-, and Underworlds).  They knew nothing of the day-night cycle.  All they knew was tunnels and the salient points of their own biology.  Thus, the primordial Kerbal religion was based on their own biology, with the gloominess of their tunnels mixed in, so I have to digress a bit and explain Kerbal biology in my universe.

Kerbals are asexual fungi.  Their so-called "genders" are actually separate castes of the same species.  Humans only know of the 2 castes encountered in space, but there are others lurking down in the depths of Kerbin.  Originally, there was some now-forgotten survival advantage in having 2 worker castes of different sizes so the so-called "sexual dimorphism" of the so-called Kerbal "genders" was much greater in the past, but that need is long gone so the castes have nearly converged back to the same design these days.  Individual Kerbals live for centuries and can go dormant for centuries more in the absence of required nutrients.  Kerbals reproduce only on death by releasing millions of spores, the number making up for the infrequent "breeding" events.  The spores can lie dormant for millennia and there is some exchange of genetic material between spores of different individuals lying in the same place, so Kerbals are never exact clones of their predecessor.  Eventually, a new Kerbal sprouts and becomes self-aware for some time prior to breaking free of its rhizome and walking away as a full-grown adult.  Thus, from before Kerbals becoming self-aware, there has been a "Gardener" caste of Kerbals who gather up the spores of the dead, plant them in advantageous soils, and tend and teach the young, immobile sprouts.  The Gardeners never come to the surface.  Anyway, this is what the primordial Kerbal religion was built around.

Thus, the Kerbals originally had a pantheon of shadowy, poorly defined deities concerned with various phases in their lifecycle and the ritual of raising their sprouts.  When the Kerbals reached the Neolithic period, these deities took on more definite form and got involved in agriculture as well, which was pretty much the same as Kerbal biology.  The Gardener caste kept this ancient belief system alive and teaches it to all young sprouts before they become mobile.  However, adult members of the main castes now regard these tales as simple myths for simple young minds, similar to the human one about storks bringing babies to their parents.  Still, the largely unknown "Kult of the Gardeners" is the oldest religion on Kerbin.

Kerbals originally didn't have much of an afterlife.  Just as the spores of the dead permeated and commingled in the air and soil around them, to be ingested unavoidably by Kerbals, so to did souls lose their individuality on death and merge into a collective, omnipresent "ancestral entity" which pervaded the tunnels and was part of every living Kerbal.  Thus, any Kerbal could ask for advice, good fortune, etc---there was no priestly class..  There was also a lesser pantheon of vague spirit-like things with some dominion over various resources and their associated crafting activities which all Kerbals invoked in their daily activities.  But there was, for a long time, no "creator deity" that made everything, because to Kerbals, the solid interior of Kerbin was the totality of the universe, useless in itself, just "solid space" to be hollowed out in search of resources and living quarters.  However, as the Neolithic progressed and the Kerbals started making snacks, they noticed that worm-like things (actually another type of mobile fungus, an evolutionary ancestor of Kerbals) would tunnel into the snacks to get at the best parts, and the Kerbals naturally came to see themselves in an analogous position with Kerbin itself.

Thus, Kerbal theology finally embraced the concept of a creator god but this was not cause for joy.  The belief arose that Kerbin was just a snack made by some unspeakably huge and powerful entity, the "Great Snack Cook", who intended to eat it eventually, and that the Kerbals were nothing more than pests infesting this giant snack.  There were thus only 3 possible outcomes:

1. The entity would eventually eat Kerbin, Kerbals and all.  This became known as the "Great Chewing".
2. The entity would pull Kerbin apart, pick out and destroy the Kerbals, then eat the scraps of Kerbin.  This became known as the "Great Extermination".
3. The entity would decide the Kerbals had ruined its snack and would toss Kerbin into its incinerator, then start over without Kerbals to ruin further snacks.  This became known as the "Great Fire".

Either way, the Kerbals were screwed.  The world would certainly end violently and this could happen at any moment.  And the Kerbals themselves and all their works were merely an infestation of vermin in the cosmic scheme of things.  Naturally, this made the Kerbals depressed.  And fatalistic.  And it drove many of them mad with apocalyptic zeal.  Terrible religious wars raged between devotees of the different "Fates of Kerbin"  Other wars, equally terrible, were fought between those who wanted to maybe do something about this and those who accepted a "Fate of Kerbin" as not only inevitable but sacrilegious to try to avoid.  Yet more wars were fought between those with different ideas on how to avoid any of the "Fates of Kerbin".  War drives technology so the Kerbals entered the Bronze Age.  Small tribes amalgamated under the pressure of enemies into large nations led by rulers powerful enough to organize their collective forces.

During this troubled period, Kerbals began to believe that their souls retained their individuality after death.  This was partly due to the veneration of the new ruling class and partly as a reaction to the sudden reduction in average lifespans for the rank and file.  Eventually, the "Wars of the Great Snack Cook" came to an end as the more intransigent zealots died off and one particularly powerful chiefdom asserted dominance over the others, becoming the basis of today's Glorious Kerbal Empire.  It also helped that the Kerbals were by then feeling more unified than ever thanks to the great intermingling of spores due to so many Kerbals popping in enemy territory.

The wars, however, hadn't settled which of the "Fates of Kerbin" was correct, their adherents just agreed to stop killing each other.  And they all agreed now that perhaps they really should investigate ways of maybe avoiding the end of the world.  In fact, those most active in this effort were among the most devout believers in one "Fate" or another.  But they differed in their methods.  Followers of the "Great Chewing" believed that if they kept the "Great Snack Cook" from feeling too peckish, it wouldn't eat Kerbin, so got into Kerbal sacrifice to keep the "Great Snack Cook" replete indefinitely.  Most followers of the "Great Extermination", being the most zealously apocalyptic, had been killed in the wars and the survivors gradually merged into the "Great Chewing", thinking that reducing the number of Kerbals would ensure the survival of the rest.  The "Great Fire" denomination, however, looked outwards, not inwards, and drove most of the developments of Kerbal religious thought and societal advancement for the next few millennia.

Both main denominations had made the conceptual jump that the interior of Kerbin wasn't infinite but, as it was just a snack, must have finite boundaries.  Kerbin was but one object among many in the kitchen of the "Great Snack Cook", whom all envisioned as a giant Kerbal.  It was thus natural to think that perhaps other snacks (or at least their ingredients) were on the same kitchen shelf as Kerbin, and that Kerbals could infest a new home before Kerbin was destroyed.  Therefore, followers of the "Great Fire" began to dig upwards, far higher than ever before, in an attempt to reach the surface.  However, some of their more esoteric philosophers claimed this was ultimately futile as, just as Kerbin-the-giant-snack was infested with Kerbals and their own wormy snacks, so too must the "Great Snack Cook" be "worm" in the snack of an even larger entity, and so on ad infinitum.  Eventually, at some point in the chain, one of these entities would carry out the "Great Fire" at its level, which would destroy all the layers below.  But nobody paid these doomsayers much attention.

Eventually, followers of the "Great Fire" reached the surface and their observations threw Kerbal theology into another muddle, because the "Great Outside" wasn't at all what they were expecting.  There was, of course, a momentary panic when they saw the sun rise the first time because they thought it was the start of the "Great Fire".  But although the sun might possibly have been the dreaded incinerator, nothing else fit their prior conceptions.  Kerbin's exterior looked nothing like a snack, its surroundings looked nothing like a kitchen or even a tunnel, and there was no sign of the "Great Snack Cook".  

It took the Kerbals a long time and much religious debate and Inquisitions to adjust their theology to match observations.  The whole thing of the "Great Snack Cook" and the "Fates of Kerbin", for which so many had died, was eventually replaced by a new cosmology, although some echos linger on, such as the superstition that Minmus was made of minty ice cream.  The new consensus was that Kerbin, along all the other points of light in the sky, were the spores of some now-dead god, all floating in the air inside a cavern so vast the Kerbals couldn't see walls in any direction.  The sun was seen to be the soul of this dead god because the new Kerbal concept of individual souls had envisioned such a spark amidst their own clouds of spores, and the sun was taken as verification of this belief.  There was some initial concern that the "Great Gardener" would appear, sweep up all the spores, and plant them somewhere, but given that the "cavern" of space seemed to be so vast, this ultimately was deemed unlikely.  There was also the question of why the dead god's soul was still hanging around  instead of going on to the afterlife.  Was there really no afterlife, at least for gods?  Or was it that things moved very, very slowly at the scale of gods because they had so much distance to cover?  These and similar questions still dominate the very limited Kerbal religious discussion to this very day.  But in general, everybody agreed now on a 3-tiered cosmos, and shamans appeared among the Kerbals for the first time, and interacted with various ill-defined and vague gods of the Overworld, spirits of the Spiritworld between the others, and the Ancestors of the Underworld. all for the general benefit of Kerbalkind.

Besides these spiritual changes, Kerbal society also changed forever as many began moving onto the surface.  There was so much more elbow room up there, and claiming new territory was as simple as walking to it, without having to sculpt it out of solid rock.  Villages, then towns, and finally a few cities of mud brick and timber buildings began to cover the face of Kerbin.  So many came to the surface, and were there all through the Bronze Age, that surface concepts like "day" and "night" became part of life for all Kerbals, even the Gardeners down in the depths, who found it a convenient (if totally abstract) way of reckoning time.  There were even plans to move the Imperial Capital to the surface and construction of the great stone palace had already begun, complete with a giant statue of the current emperor.  But then disaster struck  A nearby start went supernova and obliterated all Kerbals and most of their works on the surface.  Only the burnt-out foundations of the new palace and the damaged statue remained, still visible in what is now as huge desert but what was originally a fungi-rich swamp, a perfect habitat for Kerbals.

This disaster naturally caused great civil unrest and economic dislocation.  Much chaos ensued, the now-ancient and half-forgotten religion of the "Great Snack Cook" had an apocalyptic, millennialist revival (although with major changes in doctrine), and civilization nearly collapsed.  In the end, however, the majority of Kerbals looked at their history and decided that all their problems, including this disaster, had been caused by blindly following superstitious nonsense.  They thus turned their backs on all things religious and retreated back underground where they felt they really belonged, living nearly totally secular lives, even coming to regard the ancient faith of the Gardeners as pure myth.  Of the later religions, only a highly modified form of the "Great Chewing" survived, in much reduced and greatly modified form.  It now taught that the disaster was the work of a new, evil entity called "The Kraken", who could only be appeased by Kerbal sacrifice.  Only a few fanatical and much-persecuted Kultists actually believed this, but the rest of Kerbalkind accepted "The Kraken" as a general boogeykerb, a scapegoat for when anything went wrong.

The bottom line is that while the Gardener caste continues to practice the Very Old Ways, nobody pays them any attention once they can walk.  Only a handful of adult Kerbals truly believes in The Kraken as a deity or even spirit, but nearly all use its name as a curse for want of anything better.  And so things remained for many millennia until the Kerbals once again ventured to the surface and began flying rockets.  When they faced the cosmos again, it was for science, not for religion.

Edited August 21, 2016 by Geschosskopf

[PB666]

On August 17, 2016 at 6:17 AM, luizopiloto said:

Kerbals are monotheists and praises only one God... Primus Kerman...
Inscriptions found arround the Pyramids Shrine says the Kerbal world originated from a battle between Primus Kerman and the Kraken...

Kerballah, the only commandment, thou shall not respect those that mod parts, problem is it has fallen out of respect. What goes around comes around. 

[AlphaWest]

On August 17, 2016 at 9:15 AM, NSEP said:

Im pretty sure the Kraken is an analog of Satan.

I agree.

 

On August 17, 2016 at 4:39 PM, eloquentJane said:

Not to derail too much from the topic of planetary gods, but if the Kerbol system is anything like ours, then "Kerbin" (which I don't think I've seen anyone mention in this thread so far) probably literally translates to "earth" or something similar. Which by extension means that the word "kerbal" is equivalent to "earthling".

Maybe the planets names are the same, but as you sort of said, the planets names might be in kerbal language and the planets directly translate into english.

[AlphaWest]

I've created a monster

[AlphaWest]

I think there was supposed to be a backstory implemented, but it never happened...

[Curveball Anders]

33 minutes ago, AlphaWest said:

I think there was supposed to be a backstory implemented, but it never happened...

Well it's a single player game, so everyone is free to invent what ever backstory they wish

[KSK]

On ‎18‎/‎08‎/‎2016 at 5:13 PM, Findthepin1 said:

Well, for there to have been gods, there has to have been a history. A backstory. What is the entire story of the Kerbals?

Only Squad know for sure but here's my version for whatever it's worth. In a very real sense, my kerbals have walked amongst their gods (although they're no longer referred to as such) since prehistoric times. They have no need to turn to the skies in search of deities.

Edited August 22, 2016 by KSK

[Nuclearsheep]

    Jebediah kerman is the mortal representation of kerbol. He is fated battle the kraken.