Dekerbaling Kerbin

[CanuckOverlord]

Just a note, I\'m not saying the devs did a bad job with the map. They did it fairly well, better then many fake maps. (I\'ve seen ones that are simply land-water inverses of Earth and claimed to be an alien world...)

So, upon close inspection of the map of Kerbin it\'s obvious that KSP resides in a very poorly obscured Africa. The trick comes in looking beyond the 'hehe it looks like Africa' and seeing the greater picture. For example, albeit enlarged relative to Africa, Hispania exists. Europe seems to have been mostly removed, or rather moved elsewhere. (See - Ireland in southeast). Russia exists quite fully, Japan is half-formed and peeking out of the Asian landmass. India appears to have split off and downwards.

In the northwest, Central America has been removed and North America\'s top half exploded into a super-continent. However, the California coast and gulf coasts are recognizable, as is South America.

Feel free to extrapolate further.

[samstarman5]

It is easy to find similarities in land when resolution is of such a massive difference between how Kerbin is drawn and real life Earth. Make any super large Civilization map with continents and you will find similarities there. To be honest, I really don\'t see a lot of the places that you mark out as being close enough to be called as such.

[Imandreas]

Most of that 'Antartica' is actually ice-free.

I do not get the 'Japan' part. Looks nothing similar. \'Nuthin.

The 'South America' looks more like an India to me.

The second and third are completely an opinion. The similar landmasses appear like so since they are familiar with Earth-based ones. However, the planet is procedurally generated from an internal seed, I think.

[Khrissetti]

Earth is so vaired that just about any fictional, but realistic, Alien continents will have passing resemblences to somewhere on Earth.

[Fendleton]

Eh, the 'New Zealand' really isn\'t. I mean...seriously. Not even if you rotate it round to the right alignment does it look like NZ. It\'s a bunch of islands, and one of them is longer than the others....technically that\'s SOME similarity with NZ but....not really enough.

Which is a shame, because the sum total of the space program here in New Zealand is one private company that makes micro-sized suborbital rockets for research payloads...it\'d be nice to be able to fake a launch from NZ (or blow up Auckland/Gore/etc) in KSP.

[101m4n]

This reminds me of trying to find shapes in clouds, people see what they want to see, and nobody sees the same thing.

[rkman]

nobody sees the same thing.

Except that in the case of Kerbin most people do see Africa.

[Thobewill10]

The problem here is that the planet was not hand-crafted by the devs; rather, it was generated with a script, found here: http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/examples/complexplanet/index.html.

[Endeavour]

The one labelled as Africa is the only similarity I see.

[101m4n]

Except that in the case of Kerbin most people do see Africa.

well yes, but let\'s not be too pedantic.

either way it makes little difference to gameplay, so i don\'t see the need to read too much into it

If however, i were being pedantic I would point out that kerbin also has a blue sky (nitrogen based atmosphere?), liquid oceans, land distributed in continents, and a value for acceleration due to gravity of 9.81ms^-2, all of which are traits it shares with earth, and most of which are far more integral to gameplay than the shapes of the continents themselves.

you see my logic now :?

[wildkittyv1]

While I\'m pretty sure pretty much everyone who plays this game sees the KSC continent as Africa when they first look at the map, I\'ll agree that some of the other continents and landmasses reminded me of Earthly shapes. However, it\'s not really a problem, regardless of how the Terrain was generated. It actually put a little idea in my mind for the history of the planet about how perhaps it\'s just a very old or very young Earth when things were a bit different (disregarding tectonic plate shift and our predictions about the future and assumptions/knowledge about the past). Maybe these little Kerbonauts are future humans, or our ancestors? We don\'t know much about them or their history, and it really has no bearing on the game, but I think they\'re more or less funny coincidences than anything else.

[101m4n]

Maybe these little Kerbonauts are future humans, or our ancestors?

if so then earth has shrunk (or grown) quite a bit

kerbin is roughly 1200 times smaller than earth in terms of volume xD

[wildkittyv1]

if so then earth has shrunk (or grown) quite a bit

kerbin is roughly 1200 times smaller than earth in terms of volume xD

Yeah, I know, but still... it\'s funny to think about. Maybe something strange happened to the sun, or the universe in general, which impacted gravity and/or the density of matter around 'here' and the earth shrank, causing our people to grow smaller, while elongating their heads, and embellishing them with a greenish skin tone.

It doesn\'t make any sense, but that\'s what I\'m going with since it\'s unlikely we\'ll ever have any kind of official lore for where Kerbin is located or which universe it may or may not reside in.

[Fulbert]

This reminds me of trying to find shapes in clouds, people see what they want to see, and nobody sees the same thing.

Kinda reminds me of a Russian... Erm... 'scientist' guy who claims to have found slavic writings in orbital photographs of basically anywhere in the Earth. He has even found them in the photos of Mars surface, solar corona and plaster samples showed to him by a troll.

Back on the topic, I don\'t see anything wrong with Kerbin looking somewhat like Earth. It was concieved as a fantasy microversion of the Earth, after all.