Poll: do you suffer from space junk?

[awfulhumanbeing]

As of me, I dont suffer from it, but I have lots of it on orbits, and never collided.

Space junk makes KSP more challenging!

[The Aziz]

Nah, the closest unwanted encounter with something drifting in orbit was when I missed  a hit with my space station by about 200 meters. 

[stibbons]

I try hard to not generate debris in the first place.

The first stage is planned to be not quite orbital. For missions in the Kerbin system, I plan the transfer to either intercept the target or come around on a free return and intercept Kerbin. Either way the upper stage only needs minor correction and there's no debris. 

Less experienced with interplanetary missions, but the few I've done have also had transfer stages that were either dropped to the surface or deliberately left in orbit as Remotetech relays. 

[The Flame Cat]

Nope. I create new saves so often that space junk never accumulates.

Could you make this into an option?

"It's never a problem as i create new saves so often"

Edited June 18, 2016 by The Flame Cat

[Snark]

The chance of actually colliding with debris is microscopic. I've been playing KSP a lot for a couple of years, and generate LOTS of debris, and have never had a collision once.

Space is big. The amount of debris is small (the game limits it to a few hundred by default). The fact that everything outside the physics bubble is on rails and therefore can't collide with each other further limits the chance.

Then add in the fact that KSC is on the equator, and therefore the overwhelming majority of orbiting objects are going in the same direction, and you further limit the chance.

So, yeah, not a problem.

[Mjarf]

I had a near miss the other day, had a leftover booster zoom past at several km/s at about 10km distance, that's really close at those velocities. I had an interplanetary craft enter a clockwise orbit around Kerbin on accident, so all debris in orbit was moving at 4-6km/s relative to the craft. After this incident I went to the tracking station and started terminating space debris, don't want any of my crews die because of leftover rocket parts.

[Biff Space]

I used to just delete the debris from the tracking station (slow computer, so large save files slowed down scene changes). In my current game, I've been doing the same as Stibbons describes above - matching stages to the flight path has been an extra consideration when designing vessels, and I've found that a fun challenge to modify my existing designs.

I have also launched a ship into LKO with a bunch of KIS explosives to catch any debris that gets left in stable orbits. BOOM! 

[pandaman]

My 'house rule' is that I can delete or recover landed debris, but anything in space has to be removed manually (manually clicking the 'terminate' button doesn't count).  I try to stage my launches to de-orbit the lower stages naturally or give them enough control and fuel to enable me to de-orbit them easily.

[Van Disaster]

You missed "No, all my craft are recoverable". Also, you can just turn junk down to 0  & the game will delete it all anyway.

[Madrias]

Often?  No.  However, I have had it happen a few times.  I've had 3 incidents in the entire time I've played KSP.

One: Spent rocket booster from my shuttle through the solar panels of my space station.  Replacement solar panels requested.  Request granted, then resources reallocated to the munbase project.

Two: Retrograde + Prograde space station collision.  Resulting debris caused rescue shuttle to explode, adding to space junk.  New Universe created after incident.

Three: Crashed spacecraft on Minmus.  Debris reached orbital velocity, damaged solar array on space station.  Debris proceeded to deorbit and crash on Minmus' surface.

 

But you specifically asked, "Do I suffer from space junk?"  The answer is simple.

No.  I enjoy every moment of it.  That spent booster lingering somewhere around a 105km x 240km orbit is just waiting to get its chance to ruin some Kerbals' day.  The smashed space station debris ring around Jool is an ever-present reminder of why you don't aerobrake a station to slow it down.  A lone wing segment with one solitary OX-STAT solar panel on it spins ever so slowly in the darkness above Eve, a relic of a forgotten era.  And there's plenty of other space debris in my saves, because lately, I haven't bothered playing 'clean up' with my space program.  The closest thing I've done to that is the fact that, when possible, I try to deorbit nuclear engines into either Eve or the Sun.  Usually the sun.

[ag3nt108]

I nuke mine every 3 or 4 launches, which can be a pain when I have a plethora of rescue missions since the craft still show as junk.  Anyway I would have to be awkward and go somewhere between No but I have plenty of Junk and No i de-orbit all mine.

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

I had a near miss with space junk once, scared the hell out of me!

a stage separator ring passed within 10m of a space station at about 5m/s, actually cast a shadow on the station as it passed, it was debris from building the station which it what put it on such a perfect orbit.

today I deorbit everything I can, but still have some junk up there. (which should have been a choice on the poll)

Edited June 18, 2016 by Brainlord Mesomorph

[Xavven]

4 hours ago, stibbons said:

I try hard to not generate debris in the first place.

The first stage is planned to be not quite orbital. For missions in the Kerbin system, I plan the transfer to either intercept the target or come around on a free return and intercept Kerbin. Either way the upper stage only needs minor correction and there's no debris. 

Less experienced with interplanetary missions, but the few I've done have also had transfer stages that were either dropped to the surface or deliberately left in orbit as Remotetech relays. 

I do the same. With interplanetary transfer stages, I try to put them on a direct collision course with the destination planet or moon. The added role-play bonus is that impactors give us a lot of scientific data IRL. It's not modeled in the game but oh well.

That said, debris orbiting Kerbin is a slight risk, but debris orbiting Kerbol (the "Sun") really isn't a problem. There's so much more space that the odds of collision shrink to just about nothing, for all practical purposes. This is congruent with real life, too. The solar system is full of natural asteroids and micro-meteoroids that pose more risk than leaving a spent booster between Earth and Mars. We really shouldn't care about heliocentric debris.

Space junk around Earth, however, is a real problem -- moreso than players tend to see in KSP. The reason is that there are some very specific orbits that are useful to us Earthlings, geostationary being most notable, that we launch a LOT of satellites into, and there are very limited slots. Just imagine what your save would look like if a thousand KSP players launched stuff into a 100km x 100km equitorial orbit by default all in the same save. It would get ugly!

[SelectHalfling0]

I've had a number of really close passes before while doing docking maneuvers. I wonder if some day one will actually hit something while it's loaded.

[The Optimist]

3 hours ago, Mjarf said:

I had a near miss the other day, had a leftover booster zoom past at several km/s at about 10km distance, that's really close at those velocities. I had an interplanetary craft enter a clockwise orbit around Kerbin on accident, so all debris in orbit was moving at 4-6km/s relative to the craft. After this incident I went to the tracking station and started terminating space debris, don't want any of my crews die because of leftover rocket parts.

how is 10km close?! Let's assume that there is a 10km radius disk around your spacecraft, which likely isn't longer than 20 meters and wider than 10. The area of the disk is 314159265.359 square meters, while the area of your ship is around 200 square meters. The rectangular silhouette of a Large Orange Tank is 8 square meters. If we divide 314159265.359 by 8 meters, there will still be a 39269908.1699 square meter area where a passing orange tank will not hit. Divide that by 30 and you have the chances of a collision, which turns out to be 1/1308996.939 

Edited June 18, 2016 by The Optimist

[LordFerret]

2 hours ago, Van Disaster said:

You missed "No, all my craft are recoverable". Also, you can just turn junk down to 0  & the game will delete it all anyway.

That's an idea, except I had a situation once where my craft exploded and crew were still alive in the attached lab ... the lab got turned into debris. The crew got marked as missing, so I went and searched the debris. I found them. I sent a rescue ship and recovered them. Had the debris been deleted by this '0' junk setting, I'd have 2 Kerbals dead to my credit. That's a no no in my book. This was back in v0.90.

[Snark]

Another thing that makes junk much less of an issue is if you're really nitpicky about orbits.

For example, when I put something in a circular orbit, I like it to be really circular.  As in, Pe within a couple of hundred meters of Ap.  There's no real reason for that other than OCD; I just happen to like it that way.  I'm also nitpicky about orbital inclination, too; my equatorial-orbit stuff around Kerbin is very equatorial.

So, what that means is that when I launch stuff into LKO (the only place that's even vaguely crowded enough that debris could ever be an issue): there's never any relative velocity to speak of.  Stuff that gets staged away while I'm still suborbital ends up falling back and burning up.  Anything that's put in place in LKO ends up in a perfectly equatorial, circular orbit.  So collision pretty much can't happen.  If I'm flying Thing A, and Thing B has an orbit whose radius is close enough to Thing A's that collision is geometrically possible... they're only moving at very, very slow velocities relative to each other (like 1 m/s, or even less), so it just doesn't come up.

Collision risk happens when you have orbits that cross each other.  Orbits that never cross-- or which are virtually perfect matches-- don't have this problem.

 

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

2 minutes ago, Snark said:

Anything that's put in place in LKO ends up in a perfectly equatorial, circular orbit.  So collision pretty much can't happen.

doesn't that make rendezvous a real pain?

I try to put major things (stations, ships under construction) in a 80x100  orbit,  so a ship in an 80x80  orbit has lots of intercept opportunities. 

[Snark]

2 minutes ago, Brainlord Mesomorph said:

doesn't that make rendezvous a real pain?

I try to put major things (stations, ships under construction) in a 80x100  orbit,  so a ship in an 80x80  orbit has lots of intercept opportunities. 

Exactly the opposite.  Being perfectly circular makes rendezvous super easy.  It's one of the reasons I do it.  A circular orbit has infinite intercept opportunities.

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

not if your target is on the opposite side of your perfectly circular orbit,  one of you is going to have to go into an elliptical orbit (or wait a good long time w/ a relative speed of 1 m/s). 

About debris:

1. I also use the barely-suborbital second stage, or just go SSTO. 

2. I have a method of deorbiting all my orbital construction debris: As I build a station or ship, I leave all the debris (girder segments, separator rings, orbital stages of various payload modules) all attached to the ship until the very end, Then at Ap, (100km) I do little retrograde burn that puts my Pe at about 50km (about 15 m/s) then I jettison all the debris, turn around and accelerate back up to orbital velocity.

its fun to watch the clean, finished ship fly out of the cloud of construction debris. Then you switch over to any piece of debris, and watch it all come down. (all gone!)

 

 

[Mjarf]

1 hour ago, The Optimist said:

how is 10km close?! Let's assume that there is a 10km radius disk around your spacecraft, which likely isn't longer than 20 meters and wider than 10. The area of the disk is 314159265.359 square meters, while the area of your ship is around 200 square meters. The rectangular silhouette of a Large Orange Tank is 8 square meters. If we divide 314159265.359 by 8 meters, there will still be a 39269908.1699 square meter area where a passing orange tank will not hit. Divide that by 30 and you have the chances of a collision, which turns out to be 1/1308996.939 

I know that that it was close to 0% chance it would have hit the craft, but it definitely felt close, that's what I meant. Maybe I should have worded it a bit differently.

[Superfluous J]

Anything I'm never going to touch again must be in one of several states:

1. Landed. I can terminate these as nothing can ever collide with them.
2. On a trajectory that intersects ground (you can count the Sun and Jool's "ground" in this). I can terminate these as they're going to crash.
3. On a trajectory that will leave Sun and never come back.
4. On a trajectory that intersects atmosphere. I can terminate these as they're going to either burn up, crash (see #2 above) or land (see #1 above)
5. On a trajectory that will (maybe even some day in the far future) intersect another Sphere of Influence. Gravity assists will eventually put the craft in states 1, 2, 3, or 4 above.

Sure, I have a 1 in eleventy bajillion chance that I delete something that would - before it would have crashed or have been tossed aside - have crashed into one of my ships but I'm willing to take that risk for a nice clean map screen.

Edited June 18, 2016 by 5thHorseman

[awfulhumanbeing]

5 hours ago, Van Disaster said:

 

You missed "No, all my craft are recoverable".

 

That belongs to "I deorbit all the debris"

[Snark]

3 hours ago, Brainlord Mesomorph said:

not if your target is on the opposite side of your perfectly circular orbit,  one of you is going to have to go into an elliptical orbit (or wait a good long time w/ a relative speed of 1 m/s).

One of us does not have to "go into" an elliptical orbit-- the other one already is.

The "destination" (e.g. space station) is in a perfectly circular orbit.

The "traveler" (thing that I'm piloting) is coming from somewhere.  Maybe launched from KSC, maybe returning from Mun or Minmus or another planet.  So I just set up its (already) elliptical orbit to rendezvous with the station.

"Rendezvous two things that are already in circular orbit" pretty much never happens, for me, because circular orbit is where I put things.  If I've already put a thing where I want it to be, why would I move it to rendezvous with something else? 

 

[ZooNamedGames]

I've got a save with what must be over 1,000 pieces of debris and although I see them often pass within a few kilometers of me, I've never had them hit me.

In fact, one of the coolest moments in KSP for me, was when I did a booster test and hopped up to 65km and as I reached my peak altitude, I slowed down and kind of "hovered". As I did, I could pan around and watch as like 9 different pieces of debris flew by. It was amazing.