How do you define Kerbal?

[Guest]

If that's the rocket I'm thinking of, it's definitely Kerbal in nature. It looks more like a Russian building than a vehicle.

And it's going to take MOAR BOOSTERS to make it get off the ground, believe me! 10 metres off the pad is not an impressive altitude.

However, I can make it work as a Saturn V/LK-700 combo... Historical mashup, anyone?

[Toshogu]

When someone says "that is very Kerbal" I usually take it as "Jerry rigged contraption that is unsafe to operate, but has a 40% chance of working correctly"

Basically, if your friend says, "dude my car is way Kerbal" don't get into his car.

[eskimo]

To me, the word Kerbal is almost synonymous with the adage "trial-and-error." We try many crazy things, blow them up unintentionally, generally quite spectacularly, go back the the VAB and try again. Eventually, we come out with something that has a function and works well.

It's different than real life because our missions take place in the same place as our simulations do. SpaceX did many hours upon hours of maths, and simulations, and engineering things that MIGHT go wrong, because well, a 10-story rocket costs a whole butt-ton of money. It's not cost effective to just slap together a fuel tank with an engine with a new guidance system "just to see what happens"

We do this in the blink of an eye, because other than a little bit of guilt at slamming Bob, Jeb, and Bill into Kerbin at hypersonic speeds, it doesn't actually cost us anything.

Edit: This

Kerbal

2)Adjective: Something (usually in aerospace engineering) that looks like it's doomed to failure, but isn't.

Edited August 17, 2013 by eskimo

[Accelerando]

I define it as "that one word used a lot by jerks who like to tell people how you 'objectively' can't have fun taking the game seriously" or some such tripe

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

Mine definition is:

FTL, backwards, inside Jool, and there are pink clouds with 'splosions and rainbows, and rainin' jebs.

Basically, messed up.

[KevinTMC]

I started in late .18 I've never gone without landing legs, etc.

...and whenever I see Junkyard or found on the side of the road as manufacturers I laugh at it derisively, I recognize it as a call back to the old game but I see it as alien to the feel of the game now and wonder why it was left in.

I think that career mode could help this all make more sense--the wackiness and the advanced engineering and everything in between.

It's only natural that at the very beginning of a space program, things would be more improvisational, more experimental, more crazy-seeming, more up-in-the-air, with more of a buccaneer if not reckless spirit. This was true enough of NASA; certainly it would be more so for Kerbals, because even if you tone down their goofiness, there's still no making them into safety-obsessed green-eyeshades types.

So I hope that, at the start of career mode, the player will be basically finding parts in junkyards and assembling them into jerry-built contraptions and experimenting wildly and enjoying lots of educational failure and explosions. This is not to portray Kerbal engineering as incompetent--far from it! (When, at the end of the episode, MacGyver saved the day by building a nuclear reactor out of toothpicks, rotten carrots, and dental floss, was that a sign of his incompetence?) It's instead the nature of early spaceflight experimentation when you're on the ground floor, probably on a smallish budget (Project Mercury cost, what, 1/50th of the Apollo program?), and have only basic knowledge and no real experience to work from. Add in a dash of the Kerbal nonchalance regarding safety and penchant for improbable designs, and I think it's quite sensible to have more of a gonzo feel to the Kerbal space program in the early days.

As the budget grows, as knowledge is developed, as experience is gained, and as there's more at stake in each mission, there will naturally be an ebbing of the gonzo and jerry-built and wacky, and an increase in professionalism and refinement. But there should remain light-heartedness, and even room for silly humor. (If the game ever gets too serious for there to be "FOOD" and "NOT FOOD" bins in the IVA, or too serious to let Pete Conrad in a Kerbal body--i.e. Jeb--near the controls of a spacecraft, I shall be ever so sad.) And I would like for the career-mode player to be able to take a moment in the midst of, say, a high-stakes mission to land on Duna that he or she is absolutely determined to pull off without a hitch, to think back on the earlier days of the program...to think back on the equivalent of the Mercury days, and muse, "Can you believe we ever launched a Kerbal into space on that thing?", in wonder and amusement.

Those are my two cents on the subject, anyhow.

[occ]

I would define the adjective "kerbal" as having a glorious enthusiasm for risking (and possibly sacrificing) one's life for the advancement of science and/or exploration.

[CaptainKipard]

Braaaaaaains!

[technicalfool]

Begone, thread! Back to the foul depths from which you came!

(To occ: Try not to post in really old, inactive threads unless there's a really good reason for it. You can always start a new one.)

Edited October 25, 2014 by technicalfool