Kessler's syndrome

[Wragie]

I was playing a career and had a contract to recover some debris from orbit. I saved my recovery vessel and named it "Kessler's Revenge" which afterwards got me wondering just how bad can it be or get if you don't recover destroy or minimize your 'spare' parts. Normally I just delete any parts from the tracking station and don't think about it. I always found that the debris gets rather annoying when trying to find something or click on the right track etc. So I started a new game and haven't been doing anything to get rid of it just to see how bad it can get. OK I may have wanted to use a mod but Kessler sounds better lol.

 

So far all I have noticed is more activity in KEO in the odd object in sight or passing by. What I am curious about is just how bad could it get by the time you exhaust that career play through. Has anyone left all the junk flying long enough for it to develop into a actual problem? Not trying to prove or disprove the theory just curious as to effects in game mild or wild.

[Jas0n]

By default the game starts deleting debris if there's too many. I think the default amount is 250.

My habit is not to leave anything in LKO if I can help it. like leaving my first stages sub orbital.

[Guest]

TWICE, ive had 5km passes from 45° inclination old satellites, but ive never had a major problem.

[Tex_NL]

Space is big, debris is small. With a larger amount of debris in orbit you will see something come close from time to time but chances on an actual debris strikes are infinitesimally small. More than small enough to simply ignore it.

I've been playing KSP for close to five years now and never suffered an actual strike. Closest I ever got was debris within physics range.

Edited July 31, 2017 by Tex_NL
typo

[MajorTomtom]

Also I think that if you are not focused on one spacecraft in LKO, debris collision will not be calculated (never tried, but I think it would be really hard to do that). Therefore, unless you spend a lot of time focused on a huge LKO station with countless debris you will probably never have any problem

[Tex_NL]

47 minutes ago, MajorTomtom said:

Also I think that if you are not focused on one spacecraft in LKO, debris collision will not be calculated

This is 100% correct. Anything beyond your current physics bubble is 'on rails' and no physics is calculated. Even in the unlikely event a piece of debris is actually on a direct collision course it will pass straight through without any interaction.

This behaviour can be used to 'cheat' yourself out of trouble. If you're coming in too fast for docking without the means to avoid a collision go to 5x physics warp. Your craft will pass though each other as if they weren't there. However do NOT leave physics warp until they have passed through completely. Just as in real life two objects can not occupy the same point in time and space at the same time. Things WILL go boom!

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

Since probably 99.9% of my launches are equatorial, I found out early that clicking on a ship kept getting tougher, because I kept clicking on debris instead. You could simply stop tracking it, of course, but I figured if I was gonna do that I may as well just delete it. I've kept LKO clean ever since, and have been happier for it.

[Kobymaru]

Realistically, it will never get bad at all, you will not run into the risk of ever hitting debris accidentally.

However, most players (including me) are kind of OCD and just don't like leaving garbage around. If you're one of those, you should deorbit it. If you're not, there's really no point.

[PT]

I had to send new solar module to my station after spent stage from few launches ago decided to take over my station from behind. MJ is too good with matching orbits  This fun roleplaying experience sent me on war path against Kessler syndrome. Left overs from orbital constructions and MJ controlled encounters are pretty much only thing with any hit chance, so problem was not the problem, but my approach to problem.

So I made standardized lifting rocket for 10/20/40 tons to LKO (0/2/4 boosters), now I tend to arrive in target orbit with nothing more than Poodle and almost empty quarter-jumbo tank which can be deorbited with separatrons (or decoupler mod with retroengines included), docking can be done with RCS or some tug. Of course such approach changes Kerbal way of creating rocket to payload to more "human" way of matching cargo to rocket, which can be fun in itself (now my station resupply drones double up as rescue/return pods just because I had spare capacity).

[NSEP]

I always have spent stages and decoupler parts lingering around my space stations. Not the best thing to have, but it adds in a little bit of gameplay challenge.

[Tex_NL]

I just remembered I managed to capture one of my closest debris encounters:

I spotted it whizzing by frighteningly close and turned to the map to see what happened. There I spotted piece of debris with just 0.5km separation on the next encounter. But also note the second encounter: again very close. This piece of debris had nearly the same orbital period. Just for peace of mind I moved my Mun station to a different orbit.

Edited July 31, 2017 by Tex_NL

[RoadRunnerAerospace]

well, once upon a time, one of my many part ships exploded on an equatorial orbit at around 100km up, my general space station altitude, i have had one major encounter with debris, when it got within 1km of my ship. Still lots of debris up there.

[Curveball Anders]

Since I tend to do a lot of launches to a standard 72-ish 0 inclination orbit I try to make sure that no lifter stage stays in that orbit.

Other debris tend to end up in very eccentric orbits (or heading out of SOI).

So the only debris I have to manually clean up is scraps from sloppy agencies leaving kerbonauts stranded in low orbit

But I have had both collisions and near misses when acting sloppy around my own stations and/or satellites.

 

[Casualnaut]

Do kerbals count as debris? I had a lot of kerbal go missing and show up shredding my solar panels. Man those people were rude, I got to generate power too!

 

[natsirt721]

One of the major contributors to Kessler syndrome is that on-orbit collisions dramatically increase the amount of debris to interact with.  Seeing as how collisions between vehicles can only occur while one of them is actively loaded, it seems unlikely to me that you could ever reach a critical mass of space debris necessary for this to seriously impact gameplay.  You may get unlucky and get whacked a few times in LKO but the odds are pretty good that you're not going to have a serious problem.

Edited July 31, 2017 by natsirt721

[Kerbal pancake]

Best to leave it in orbit 

capatilists crash into it due to their budget restrained technology while we communists have much superior technology 

[Archgeek]

19 hours ago, natsirt721 said:

One of the major contributors to Kessler syndrome is that on-orbit collisions dramatically increase the amount of debris to interact with.  Seeing as how collisions between vehicles can only occur while one of them is actively loaded, it seems unlikely to me that you could ever reach a critical mass of space debris necessary for this to seriously impact gameplay.  You may get unlucky and get whacked a few times in LKO but the odds are pretty good that you're not going to have a serious problem.

Yup.  Plus while real spacecraft parts tend to shatter into clouds of murderous paint flecks and co. when struck, KSP parts just explode into nothingness, so that two debris fields interacting tends to result in less debris than before, especially if they consist mostly of individual parts.

[Messy Recipe]

I have a couple pieces of launchers buzzing around within the atmosphere, mostly around 50km or so, but one of them's at something like 26km which apparently is still too low-pressure for it to unload. So now when I'm sitting on the launchpad I sometimes see their shadows whizzing past.

[monstah]

Not really what you asked, but tangentially:

On 30/07/2017 at 11:13 PM, Wragie said:

I always found that the debris gets rather annoying when trying to find something or click on the right track etc.

I noticed you said this and no one else mentioned anything about it.

Do you know you can filter ship types (i.e., Ships, Stations, Rovers, Debris, etc.) out in the map screen, so you just focus on the ones you care about at the moment? There's a row of (small) buttons on the top of the screen, if you click the "debris" they'll all disappear from the map (and Tracking Station). Right-clicking a button turns makes all other types disappear.

[Wragie]

Actually Monstah the inability to easily select was one of the main reasons I got into just got into the habit of automatically deleting everything. Even with heavy filters the best I could do at some points was to turn off everything, then find the craft turn on the minimum again and click. A bit easier through the tracking station but then loading it takes more time and so on. Can be worked around obviously but it annoys one to do so lol.

I hadn't realized the debris number was set so low. I wonder if it is possible to disable or increase that to see what happens? As long as they stayed out of physics range you shouldn't notice (much? Any?) Would still be interesting to see what might happen when the numbers started approaching real world figures. Of course any collisions would be kerbalized and end up reducing the number lol. I love how certain kerbal actions really make no sense. I jettisoned a pair of drouge chutes after they fully deployed and slowed my capsule tonight. They were attached to a nose cone that hid the mains. Near the ground at a nice sedate fps descent one of the drug use goes sailing by at a few times my descent rate and smacks into the ground and EXPLODES. Seeing things like that make me ponder how the game would actually handle a real Kessler cloud collision lol.   

[TheRagingIrishman]

6 hours ago, Wragie said:

I hadn't realized the debris number was set so low. I wonder if it is possible to disable or increase that to see what happens? 

You can change it in Settings->General: Max Persistent Debris (it's a slider)

6 hours ago, Wragie said:

I hadn't realized the debris number was set so low. I wonder if it is possible to disable or increase that to see what happens? 

You can change it in Settings->General: Max Persistent Debris (it's a slider)

[Snark]

On 7/31/2017 at 5:46 AM, Kobymaru said:

Realistically, it will never get bad at all, you will not run into the risk of ever hitting debris accidentally.

^ This.

On 7/31/2017 at 5:46 AM, Kobymaru said:

However, most players (including me) are kind of OCD and just don't like leaving garbage around.

^ Would take issue with this, though.  Citation please?  Some players, sure, I'll grant you that.  "Most" implies having some numbers.  Personally, I'd guess the exact opposite, i.e. that the large majority of users (including me) couldn't care less about orbital debris, since it doesn't affect gameplay at all and is un-tracked by default so it doesn't clutter the tracking UI.

But I don't actually have numbers, which of course is why I qualified the above comment with "I'd guess".  

[steuben]

Somewhere in the mists of forum history there is a Kessler-Bomb craft. A few of these on counter orbits would create the situation. Though you'd need to be sitting one of the cloud to see any effects.

The better example would be a station impacting a Kessler cloud.

[Kobymaru]

19 minutes ago, Snark said:

Would take issue with this, though.  Citation please?  Some players, sure, I'll grant you that.  "Most" implies having some numbers. 

I don't have numbers obviously, but my subjective feeling is that pretty much everyone says "I know it doesn't matter, but I'll just let the periapsis < 70km, cuz I want to be a good citizen". Interesting that you have a different perception.

[Snark]

2 hours ago, Kobymaru said:

my subjective feeling is that pretty much everyone says "I know it doesn't matter, but I'll just let the periapsis < 70km, cuz I want to be a good citizen".

My own feeling is that pretty much everyone says nothing of the sort.  Pretty much everyone just writes about hitting orbit or whatever and doesn't even mention what they do with the spent stages.  Very few posts ever mention what they do about debris, at all.

A search for the word "debris" turns up 12,681 hits.  Compare that with 3,041,546 posts in the forum as of now.  So debris gets mentioned in roughly one out of every 240 forum posts.  Hardly something that "pretty much everyone" talks about.    Which is not super surprising, because debris is almost completely irrelevant to gameplay.  Since there's not any reason to care about it, it's unsurprising that most folks don't mention it.

And it's hardly surprising that among the posts that actually mention debris, the "I like to clean it up" contingent is probably disproportionately represented, relative to the "I don't care" faction.  For a very simple reason:  People who care (or are OCD) about a thing are more likely to write about that thing.  For the (I assume) vast majority of KSP players who don't give a wet slap about debris one way or the other, chances are that they're not writing about it (or bothering to read threads about it) because it's not something they care about or ever think about.

When the only people who are likely to write about a thing are the ones who care about that thing, you get an overwhelming selection bias, which might account for your impression that "most people care," when I suspect the actual state of affairs is that the vast majority of folks don't care at all.