Kessler Syndrome

[Ironwatsas]

A random bit of curiosity: Has anyone here ever had a situation wherein they've filled low kerbin orbit with a crapload of debris? Or otherwise, a situation with a collision between debris and a ship or station?

I had a lot back in 0.19, but since then have atleast attempted to design rockets where the boost stages can be easily de-orbited. I think the worst I've had since then was when the Kraken attacked my KSS-3

So share your horror (or hilarity) stories I guess

[NeoMorph]

Yeah, I've had saves that were horribly Kesslerfied (mostly the early days). And yes, a lot was due to a space station that was smashed to smithereens when I hit the main engine by accident on a docking shuttle.

Worst case was at 75km where a load of tanks were dumped before I planned that the main stage was cut away before it made orbit. Nowadays my boost stages end up in a sub-orbital path when I cut them away to stop the Kessler problem. Even the munar stages end up hitting the ground.

[Scorpi15]

Free-return-trajectory/Mun impact trajectory to get rid of debris FTW!

[Wesreidau]

I try to keep all my debris in a deteriorating orbit, but might pick up a mod for a 'laser broom' to go around zapping all the strut connectors and decoupler rings I left lying around.

[Jackissimus]

I try to keep all my debris in a deteriorating orbit, but might pick up a mod for a 'laser broom' to go around zapping all the strut connectors and decoupler rings I left lying around.

Unfortunately there is no such thing as a deteorating orbit in KSP. Well almost ... your orbit has to have Pe under 22km on Kerbin otherwise it will never deteriorate.

[Hannu]

I have had about 300 debris between 120-200 km orbits, where I typically park planet crafts before transfer orbit burns. Then I can sometimes see something in range where game shows nearby things (is it 100 km?). However, I have never noticed distance below 10 km, so that I think than possibility of collision is negligible. I think that during normal playing it is impossible to get such amount of stuff in orbit, that there would be real danger. There is no real Kessler syndrome in KSP, because colliding parts disappear in explosions instead of disintegrating to thousands of centimeter sized particles like real parts do.

[Epthelyn]

A random bit of curiosity: Has anyone here ever had a situation wherein they've filled low kerbin orbit with a crapload of debris? Or otherwise, a situation with a collision between debris and a ship or station?

Very nearly.

In 0.20 I made a fairly large space station which started to wobble so badly I had to dismantle parts of it and reattach them. The docking went horribly wrong and the solar array smashed into a million pieces and took out the crew module. I decided to replace the parts with ones which wouldn't wobble too much, which meant replacing the core with triple/quadruple ports. That meant taking everything off the core, letting it float around and then putting everything back to together in a rapidly diminishing framerate (3-5FPS during construction). More hilarity occured and I ended up with close to 500 parts floating in a nice neat cloud around Kerbin.

Later (5 ingame months or so later so everything was spread out), rocket aiming for 150km orbit passed right through the middle of the debris field, missing a few pieces by less than 2km.

So yeah, nearly.

[Tiron]

Unfortunately there is no such thing as a deteorating orbit in KSP. Well almost ... your orbit has to have Pe under 22km on Kerbin otherwise it will never deteriorate.

Unless you focus the piece of debris in question while it's in the atmosphere(Less than about 69.2km)...the tracking station has a 'debris' category for a reason. Focused = simulated = drag, even if you can't control what it is you're focusing. Anything within 2.4km or so gets simulated too, in the event you have a cluster of junk.

Edit: For the record, the ~20km limit you noticed isn't because the orbit actually deteriorates, it's because anything on rails below that altitude is automatically despawned. This is most visible if you eject something while below that altitude and then get more than 2.4km away from it. It'll disappear the instant it passes out of simulation range. On rails parts do not simulate physics and as such can't collide with anything, including planets. If they weren't despawned, they'd fall through the surface, loop around the center of the planet, and then come flying back up out of it.

Note that the 'no physics' means that debris can't hit debris, but this won't protect your active ship: The instant the debris gets within the 2.4km simulation limit, it's taken off rails and regains physics, and thus is perfectly able to smash you flat.

Edited August 20, 2013 by Tiron

[Crown]

I had no incident of colliding with debris. But I had come quite close to debris. Mostly 30km. And because I launch with less than 2° inclination, the risk is rising.

[Syhrus]

Pffff you call that a debris field?

THAT is a debris field.

The kraken attacked a large space station I had. Some parts of it got launched on an escape trajectory from the sun...

[PwnedDuck]

I had thousands of pieces of debris floating 75-69 kilometers up, and they would regularly get about about 800m from the crafts I was launching. I was thinking of building a huge plate with a big surface area to see if I could actually get a collision, but the debris (that and making it hard to click on vessels to target them) was affecting performance so I turned it down to 25 pieces max. It never got to dangerous levels though...

[annallia]

I never really paid much attention to how much debris I was putting into orbit until I tabbed out one day after putting a new station part in orbit. When I came back my solar panels looked funny, they were floating away.... It was then that I saw the boost stage from an old rocket trailing behind me. It was a completely freak accident, the boost stage was on an eliptical orbit and just happened to line up with my new station module, should be happy it only took the solar panels off.

Since then however I have worked to clear debris, because I hate deleting it one by one I started either ditching stages where they will be on a sub orbital path or I slap a few of the little solar panels on them and a probe core and leave them with enough fuel for me to de orbit them later.

That said accidents do happen... The Kracken attacked my kethane rovers while they were in parking orbit over Duna just after I refueled them to land

I eventually cleared the debris though I did leave it for a while.. All the parts had KAS nodes and there was a lot of fuel in there and since most of the debris was tiny bits I saw no reason my tugs couldn't fly in and use the few surviving tanks to refuel.

I also occasionally create more debris around Kerbin. I recently retired an old space station... By testing a fighter on it and blowing it up.

[CatastrophicFailure]

I regularly launch rockets specifically designed for no other reason than to create debris

I like to watch it drifting/screaming by as I go about my orbiting. Got a nice lil ring going at this point. Still no collisions yet but several sub 2.5k passes....that I'm aware of anyway.

One thing that does bug me is those silly 60x35k orbits that don't decay. Will the romfarer setup cranked to 99kms "sweep" that stuff out if orbit as it passes below?

[Zad Fnark]

I've gotten into the habit of putting the little seperator solid rockets on the last stage and aiming it for the planet/mun. I try to clean up after myself.

ZF-

[0jam3290]

This is my current .20 save. Most of the debris in LKO is at 75km and is mainly from Mercury (Atlas core stage), Gemini (Titan II 2nd stage), and Apollo/SatV Launches (Saturn V 2nd stage). Most of the debris in higher eccentric orbits are upper stages of interplanetary launchers where I used what was left of the upper stage to save some fuel on the actual transfer stage. I have yet to have any debris collisions but my closest call was at 200m.

Edited August 20, 2013 by 0jam3290

[lazarus1024]

I have had an actual collision, but I don't know that you could really call it Kessler syndrome. I had dettached a stage trying to rendezvous with my 300km personnel station. I also have a 150km refueling station. Well, I was on the first leg and had AP up to 300km and my 3rd stage only had about 5% fuel left, so I decided to discard that and circularize and dock with my docking assist stage (small 1.5m fuel tank and the small rocket motor to manuever a 6t section. Plenty of fuel). I discarded the stage. thrusted away from it a bit with RCS and as I passed 150km, without having realized it I climbed right through the orbit of my refueling station. My station module passed about 100m from the refueling station, but the discarded 3rd stage smashed right in to it!

It was rather spectacular since it was a good sized 3rd stage (rockomax large tank) and the refueling station was 4 rockomax oranges, filled to the brim with a few other parts added on. Overtake velocity was something like 150m/sec. The explosion is still seared in my retinas.

The only other time I have had a collision, other than docking was I intentionally counter orbited an ASAT in to a retired station. I actually managed to get a hit on it after about 30 orbits. I only knicked it with some solar panels on the ASAT hitting a solar panel on the station. When you've got 4,000km/sec of combined velocity though...basically physics loaded and stuff DIED. I only caught it because my machine slowed WAY down as physics loaded.

[Rainbow-Dashie]

I crashed a colony ship into a derelict space station awhile back... my orbit wasn't to debris filled though, most of the rockets I make can get to orbit without jettisoning parts. I guess it was a huge rocket ship, and a huge space station floating around and sooner or later they were going to meet!

[Brapness]

I was once launching a refueling tanker when a design flaw caused it to explode, peppering its flight path with a little debris. I was tabbing through the debris, watching it spin about when I noticed the purple object marker zip across my screen. Jebediah station, with six Kerbals on board had passed by just 200m from the debris field at a relative velocity of about 1000m/s. Needless to say I was concerned.

Not quite Kessler syndrome but another time I was docking with another station and I jettisoned the small engine and fuel tank now that I was up close. I had attached Separatrons to it to push it away, but I guess they weren't aligned perfectly, because it spiraled around and took one of the solar arrays of the station. I felt a bit stupid after that.

[Tiron]

I regularly launch rockets specifically designed for no other reason than to create debris

I like to watch it drifting/screaming by as I go about my orbiting. Got a nice lil ring going at this point. Still no collisions yet but several sub 2.5k passes....that I'm aware of anyway.

One thing that does bug me is those silly 60x35k orbits that don't decay. Will the romfarer setup cranked to 99kms "sweep" that stuff out if orbit as it passes below?

The 60x35 orbits, well, expanding the physics range using the lazor plugin WOULD fix it. sort of. They'd still have to be within that range of whatever you were focused on. Keep in mind that 99km isn't that far: Kerbin has a radius of 600km, so even at 99km physics range you're only going to 'sweep' a relatively small portion of the orbital space, so it's going to take more orbits before they get down to despawn range.

For non-mod method, you can use the 'debris' filter on the tracking station to 'fly' the relevant piece of debris. The 'simulation bubble' will thus stay centered on that piece of debris, and if it's really on a 60x35 orbit, it'll continuously decay until it crashes, which will probably only take one, incomplete, orbit.

If you've got a cluster of things in the same, atmosphere-entering orbit, you could potentially combine the two: Use Lazor to expand physics range so that the 'bubble' encompasses all the pieces in the cluster while 'flying' one of them. This way, you can take out the entire cluster at once.

The downside of focusing a piece of debris to make its orbit decay? You can't go back to the space center from it while it's in the atmosphere, so you basically have to ride it down. Unless you can somehow manage to switch to another craft after the PE gets below 20km (the point where on-rails stuff despawns). And this is a downside because...well, if you ride it down, and it hits land, there's a fair chance one or more pieces will successfully lithobrake, ending up lying there on the surface. If it hits the water though, they're all toast (unless it's a mod part that's completely invincible).

[Joe Shmoe]

My space station usually has a small amount of debris a few Kilometers away. Mostly the debris is from my crew shuttle to and from the station.

[Deadpangod3]

I swear it seems I cant make debris rings, i just naturally don't leave much debris, I've even tried purposely making debris in orbit, but it just doesn't look natural...

Maybe I just lack the ability to make debris

[HeadHunter67]

I try to deorbit debris in the process of the mission - designing staging to fall into the atmosphere, and for higher altitudes I will either put a probe core on it and manually deorbit, or slap a lot of retrograde Sepatrons or other boosters on a final stage to propel it back into atmo when it's done.

[KerbMav]

In 0.20 - yep, I am a youngtimer to KSP - I deleted debris but kept some historical artifacts, like a stage from my first Mun landing.

Now in 0.21 I sometimes even make sure I litter the system and generally dont care - on purpose - how much debris ends up in various orbits around Kerbin, Mun, Kerbol ...

btw.:

Is there a way to keep debris to show up on the map other then clicking the icon bar every time? And a setting to display debris orbits without targeting or mousing over?

[Skorpychan]

I seem to be littering the space between Kerbin and Duna, recently. Discarded stages around Kerbin, an entire crewed fracking rover that failed a Duna intercept, four kerbals on it, can't thrust on the landing rockets without the whole thing going crazy.

Also, my Munbase supply/crew exchange design tends to use the transfer stage as a door knocker. It runs out of fuel and gets jettisoned during the final retrograde burn before landing.

It amuses the hell out of me to imagine the situation in the bases. Silence, silence, WHAM KABOOM, silence, silence, THUD. Then someone knocks on the door a couple of minutes later after jetpacking over.

[31337]

Pre-0.21 i had a small kessler ring but for some reason still managed to hit some of the debris after launch!

Mine was mostly satellites and their associated launchers.

I also had a satellite collision which caused a fair amount of debris.

Im being very cautious in my 0.21 and attempting to leave no debris!