Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: Used regularly in Jeb's blog.Game of Nerds: Scott Kerbley, the chief engineer, is a fan of a Kerbal team sport very similar to Cricket.
The actual in-person contact team are three veteran astronauts, one engineer who helped create the Alcubierre Drive and one skilled Communications Officer who's supposed to scan for radio and TV signals so they can start picking up the language if they do find some aliens.
First Contact Team: Played with the Kerbals can't send a full team of anthropologists, linguists and so on along on their first interstellar mission because the ship just isn't big enough, but thanks to the FTL communications system they have the anthropology and linguistics departments of every university on Kerbin and Duna for Mission Control.At interstellar distances they're almost certainly useless, and once the Kerbals are at inter planetary distances they found an easier method. First-Contact Math: Discussed briefly in Act 1, but ultimately averted.Faster-Than-Light Travel: The Alkerbierre Drive."Hanfrod at KSC" tries to keep the irrepressible Jeb in line, without much success. Epistolary Novel: Act 1 takes this form.Casual Interplanetary Travel: Averted getting from Kerbin to the gas giant Jool took three months.It does however play the trope straight in the sense that it's a framing device for exposition and backstory. And yes, Jeb thinks it's an Incredibly Lame Pun too. Captain's Log: Parodied in-universe with the Captain's Blog.A Keeper assigned to each Kerm tree communes with their tree via a biochemical connection. Wise Tree: A fully matured Kerm tree is fully sapient, even with memories.As of Part III, another plotlines have appeared involving the war over the Kerm crisis.Two Lines, No Waiting: The exploits of the Kerbal Interplanetary Society and the daily life of Jonton, Gerselle, Joenie, and their village collide towards the end of Part I, leading to the Kerbin government looking for suitable places for kerbals to colonize before the Kerms accidentally kill all other plant life.The Space Race: The early chapters parallel the early launches in the 50's and 60's.A flight of it is shown off in the epilogue. Space Plane: It's revealed that C7 Industries in Part III are developing a RAPIER engine for the goal of an SSTO.Space Station: One is built as a test bed for Project Starseed as well as another one orbiting Duna in the epilogue.Space Elevator: Discussed about in the epilogue.