Kerbal Space Program

I've just tried reproducing the issue by moving the arial ttf files away from /usr/share/fonts (According to 'strings KSP.x86' only Arial.ttf is hardcoded). However, all strings still showed up in the settings screen from the main menu as well as the settings screen that you get in-game by pressing escape.

I do have a $HOME/.fontconfig font cache directory however. Can you please try setting up such a caching directory with 'fc-cache -s' and see if the problem persists? (I do hope fc-cache is not a ubuntu specific thing, I am however not sure).

It's not a solution, but would identify a possible workaround.

I learned of this issue today while trying to run the game on a RHEL 6 machine at my university on which I don't have root access. This actually caused me a fair amount of pain, as I'm unable to put the missing fonts in /usr/share/fonts. It would be a significant benefit for users in my situation if KSP could either use fontconfig (I don't actually know how this works or how hard it is, but it would have allowed me to simply install the fonts under my home directory) or provide an option (perhaps at the command line on startup?) to select a directory to search for fonts.
As it is, I have devised a very ugly workaround by replacing the string "/usr/share/fonts" in the KSP binary with a folder in /tmp where I placed the Arial .ttf files and a symlink back to /usr/share/fonts.