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.
> 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