[shadowgovt]

One of my favorite things in gaming is when lore develops from bugs.

When they added the ability for Kerbals to be killed in Kerbal Space Program, they tripped over a bug where the first Kerbal in the game's engine, Jebediah (the one who dated back to the original introduction of astronauts at all, where only one existed), could not be killed. Because of some of the game logic having gone unmodified from the earlier versions, some operations would cause him to be loaded into the pilot seat and those operations didn't check if he was deceased. As a result, you could lose him on a mission only for him to spontaneously appear at the controls of another mission.

The community responded with fan-art of "Jebediah Kerman, thrillmaster."

[ReactiveJelly]

I don't think I got the punchline. Thrillmaster and coming back from the dead?

[marcosdumay]

The KSP community has lore about the Kraken. They will joke about anything.

[TeMPOraL]

The Kraken is a great example indeed. An eldritch horror lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system, that is not fond of Kerbals who are too ambitious, trying to get too far, too fast. A cosmic being beyond understanding. You can't see it and will never know where it is, if the concept of being in a place even applies to it. All you can know is that, as you travel further and further out, one day you may notice the laws of nature start to change, and this means the Kraken is about to have you for dinner. And sometimes, if it spots you doing something you shouldn't be, it will reach out even all the way to your home world and consume you there.

When it strikes, it eats you swiftly, and eats you whole. It disassembles your crafts, spaghettifies your crews. No weapon or speech will save you. The Kraken transcends reality - even time travel, reloading from a saved game state, does not always stop the attack.

--

Of course, the Kraken is just a manifestation of unstable physics calculations and a floating point-based coordinate system: as you travel further out, the spacing between two consecutive coordinates gets bigger, until it overwhelms the physics engine and your craft disintegrates. And if you start doing crazy stunts, particularly involving high impulses or very fast rotations, the physics will break even if you're close to coordinate origin, due to rounding errors.

[shadowgovt]

The trick the devs used to ameliorate Krakening was pretty clever: they "smeared" acceleration between the reference frame and the ship components so that the position delta frame-to-frame was lower and therefore more of the interactions occurred in the higher-density floating point space of lower forces and smaller displacements.

[a_e_k]

I haven't played KSP yet, but that description makes me think a lot of the Dragons in the 1955 short story "The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Cordwainer Smith [0].

> Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and horror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached out for inter-stellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns kept the Dragons away.

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29614/29614-h/29614-h.htm