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Reputation loss for leaving debris in orbit


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A good idea in my opinion. Only if reputation was more significant though. I would like it if in order to upgrade some of the buildings you needed high reputation. 

Maybe if you leave nuke engines in orbit you could get a fine or something.

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2 hours ago, legoclone09 said:

As if anyone has ever gotten more than halfway through the tech tree before a new update comes out and makes them have to restart.

As if the career had an ending in the form of completed tech tree.

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I think a lot of you are overthinking this.

A lot of the difficulty options and game mechanics can be "cheated" around or "ignored" thorough clever exploitation.

If someone chose to opt in to a rep penalty for debris I think it's safe to assume they'd self moderate their own game, and not delete debris for free, or turn the max debris slider down to 0. This is really more of a "roleplaying" thing and would involve some amount of "help" from the player to make it work. It's less of an ironclad "rule" and more of a "nudge" to keep the player in the right mindset of not making extra debris.

Edited by Rocket In My Pocket
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You know what I would actually prefer instead of this? A system in which unused/not useful sats and probes become debris and THEN the rep is lost. A vessel that would become a debris would either not have sufficient power or signal to function. It would turn into a debris only after some time though. An example scenario:

There's a probe enroute to Jool. It loses signal/power before it can reach Jool. If the signal is not restored for, let's say 6 months then the probe is decalred lost and turns itself into debris and rep loss is applied.

But all this is not needed in the game IMO. It wouldn't even be that realistic. There aren't many people who care about the real life Kessler syndrome.

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For me such an option / rule wouldn't Change anything as I always try to detach any parts I don't need anymore while my ship is on a re-entry or crash trajectory. I try to do that in a way that it doesn't take much fuel to get to my final trajectory after ditching the stuff so the overall fuel capacity doesn't have to be increased too much. If I absolutely have to detach a part out in the open I go to the tracking station afterwards and blow it up. Keeps everything nice and clean and I end up with only useful stuff being shown in the tracking list.

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On 24/12/2016 at 2:30 PM, Rocket In My Pocket said:

It's less of an ironclad "rule" and more of a "nudge" to keep the player in the right mindset of not making extra debris.

To be honest, if we had an option like this, I'd probably enable it for the sole purpose of ignoring it and littering LKO with debris anyway :P. Point being, I'd imagine it would be similar to the current rep penalty for declining contracts - not really enough to matter really, but enough that it makes you think twice before doing it.

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I'm with DualDesertEagle on this one. Having garbage floating around up there messes with my OCD, so I mission plan to stage when I'm on a collision course.

I think avoiding clutter is it's own reward, so no need for extra incentives or disincentives. For others... it's probably too easy to cheat the mechanic to make this effective.

Best,
-Slashy

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i like the idea :)

could be done by paying kerbucks or reputation when deleting the debris (could depend too of their mass, part number,kind of part: fuel or battery= dangerous= extra cost, location: landed= low risk/cost, medium kerbin orbit= high cost, ...), so if you don't want to pay you have to manage them yourself or live with the cluttering. we could discuss of the gameplay balance to do for make it fun and appealing.

Edited by Skalou
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I think an "reputation loss" is kind of counterproductive from a game design point of view; players wish to be rewarded when doing good things. Having negative actions due to "not doing something" is often not regarded very well, and is quickly modified/worked around/removed in games.

For that reason I think a better option is to "slow reputation gain the more objects are in orbit".

This gives less the feeling you're activelly being punished - while still keeping the spirit of "reducing clutter means more reputation". It's also more difficult to "cheat" since it's just straightforward: X items in orbit, and reputation gain is reduced by f(X) percent.

 

 

Another idea could be tasks where you have to retrieve a (few) sets of items in orbits around kerbin, not newly created objects but already existing pieces from which you remove them.

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It's one of those situations where you can't win.  Different people like different things.

For example, I expect that plenty of people are in Slashy's boat, and prefer to keep debris down out of a sense of tidiness:

On 12/28/2016 at 1:28 AM, GoSlash27 said:

Having garbage floating around up there messes with my OCD, so I mission plan to stage when I'm on a collision course.

I think avoiding clutter is it's own reward, so no need for extra incentives or disincentives.

On the other hand... I actually like having debris.  It means there's more to look at when I'm up there, to see other stuff moving around that I put there.

I don't go out of my way to create extra debris or anything... but I don't even slightly bother to try to reduce it.  And it's not because I'm a noob, or play KSP "easy mode"-- there are plenty of other difficulty knobs that I crank up to max, because I like the challenge.  It's just that the challenge of "avoid debris" isn't one that I find personally interesting or worthwhile in my own gameplay.  Others do; I happen not to.

And that's the crux of KSP, and is a big part of what makes it such a successful game, IMHO.  It has so many opportunities for challenge, that players can pick the ones that they personally find interesting.

I'd have to say that I'd prefer not to have a penalty-for-debris feature, but it's a fairly mild preference-- mainly because there's other stuff I'd rather the devs be spending time on.  :wink:  I wouldn't be picking up my torch and pitchfork if they did implement it, though... as long as there's a way to turn it off.

Part of the reason I don't like the feature is that I'm having trouble seeing how it could reasonably model real life.  How "bad" debris is totally depends on where it is.  For example, IRL:  dump debris somewhere that's important and relatively congested, like low Earth orbit, or equatorial geosynchronous?  Bad.  Dump debris on an escape trajectory of Earth (or any other planet), so that it's just flying around the solar system, or even headed to interstellar space?  Absolutely fine-- space is, well, astronomically big, and it's basically impossible to clutter something as big as the solar system.

So if the game were to model a penalty for debris, it would either be artificial and weird ("I'm dinging you for tossing a spent booster into solar orbit", which would be silly), or else have to have some arbitrary (and therefore wrong-most-of-the-time) way of judging how "bad" a piece of debris is based on its orbit, which just seems like it would be too complicated for the player to manage.

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So if the game were to model a penalty for debris, it would either be artificial and weird ("I'm dinging you for tossing a spent booster into solar orbit", which would be silly), or else have to have some arbitrary (and therefore wrong-most-of-the-time) way of judging how "bad" a piece of debris is based on its orbit, which just seems like it would be too complicated for the player to manage

 

Well they could use the same rules we have in space applications right now; any satellite/debris launched must be planned to go into either a graveyard orbit (orbit with a perigee twice the geostationary distance) - or burn up in the atmosphere within 7 years after the end of life.

 

Problem (in reality) is: there is an exception to this "regulation by UN" for any US based company, they don't have to account for "failures", so you constantly see that company report their "propulsion system has failed", allowing them to keep using satellites without having to decommission them. 

 

It is a real problem though, and already makes going to space much more expensive, so basically not decommissioning satellites within a short time is taking a lease on our future children.

KSP should also do this: show that you can't just launch without thinking. - There should be drawbacks if you are so arrogant to let future generations clean up the mess you make.

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