Do you leave debris in orbit?

[Astronomer]

not my pic, but I figured it's relevant

[Nimbus]

Where ever possible I'm trying to avoid it, but I support leaving Persistent Debris on

[joppiesaus]

Oh I clean everything. I have a space station in orbit, so on every piece of junk is a probe on it, so I can deorbit everything.

"A good kerbalnaut is a clean kerbalnaut." - bob kerman

[Fendleton]

Usually I fit seperatrons to my upper stages......I only manually delete debris if it stops me from targeting something I need to dock with.

[MrPwner]

^Jesus Christ Monkeyballs o_0

I like to keep debris on, my pc can handle some and I like the realism of it. But the selecting orbits is indeed an annoyance, but not too much for me personally that I'd want to turn it off. But with Harvester's neat mapfiltering I hope that won't be a problem in the future.

I also tend to make 'smart' upper stages that can deorbit themselves to keep debris to a minimum. Deorbiting spent stages and watching them burn up (Deadly Reentry) is just awesome.

[Torham234]

I like to stage at strategic points, so that no jettisoned piece stays in stable orbit. Its like a minigame for me - how to design a good rocket and a probe AND make sure no derbis is left floating anywhere on the course of the journey.

The only thing that slightly irks me is that some of my satellites do not have the capability to deorbit themselves when they become obsolete.

[magnemoe]

Depend, keep LKO clear, this mostly consist of deorbiting the upper stages. My moon missions created lots of junk from the transfer stages until I found it was trivial to deorbit them but got lots of junk in solar orbit.

[chainedlupine]

Easy fix. Just make sure your debris has sufficient escape velocity. Let it be some other alien civilization's problem. :3

[Accelerando]

I build rockets that go to 70km parking orbit not to leave debris there, but only when burning to a higher and/or more eccentric orbit. Then I don't care.

[BFalcon]

I turned my persistent debris down to 0 - selecting targets was getting really annoying.

When the in-flight filtering comes in, I'll probably turn it back on, since I like the risk and the sense of continuity that the debris brings... but until then...

[NeoMorph]

^Jesus Christ Monkeyballs o_0

I like to keep debris on, my pc can handle some and I like the realism of it. But the selecting orbits is indeed an annoyance, but not too much for me personally that I'd want to turn it off. But with Harvester's neat mapfiltering I hope that won't be a problem in the future.

I also tend to make 'smart' upper stages that can deorbit themselves to keep debris to a minimum. Deorbiting spent stages and watching them burn up (Deadly Reentry) is just awesome.

Like I said before... Haystack mod fixes the selection problem.

[nats]

I cant stand having debris around - it clutters up the map view too much and its completely pointless. The chance of even seeing a piece of debris from a previous launch is extremely remote never mind crashing into it - space is BIG. I might keep some sun-bound debris in the game just to see what happens to it, if the game wasnt slow enough already.

In fact I dont like seeing anything else in the map view unless I am particularly interested in it for example if I am docking to my station or whatever. So I welcome the filtering of this view so I can turn everything off other than current mission stuff.

I do still try to de-orbit stuff where I can do it easily, but I am not that fussed about it.

Edited April 23, 2013 by nats

[rryy]

I try to keep debris from cluttering LKO, but occasionally, I get some debris that gets stuck in orbit. Usually, the debris is stuck in an eccentric orbit, so I don't really worry about those.

[RoboRay]

I don't create debris in orbit.

[Ruedii]

I often carelessly leave debris in orbit. It really would be useful to be able to filter debris from your orbital map. (Maybe I should file a feature request. The options should include showing debris that has an orbit that comes within a few kilometers of your current vehicle orbit.

[swiftgates24]

Yes, I do. Each stage I use has a docking port on it. Once in orbit, I'll jettison the stages with little amounts of RCS and fuel in them. That way, if I ever need fuel, I can dock with the debris and put fuel in them like a fuel depot, or withdraw fuel. Which is why I have about 20 fuel depots

[tomf]

I have a space tug with a couple of nuclear engines and a magnet from the KAS plugin in LKO. Whenever the debris starts annoying me I have a debris cleaning session capturing and de-orbiting some bits. the practice has made my rendezvousing pretty slick.

[Sol_Rokks_Teddy]

When i first started playing this game (0.18.4) i didn't care much about the debris, until i started targeting ships and trying to make maneuver nodes and kept accidentally targeting debris. Now i design all my ships to leave spent stages in a sub-orbital trajectory, or put a probe body on the stages that will reach orbit so they can de-orbit themselves.

[erkha343]

Since you guys are talking about debris: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25085-Tools

If you like this idea, let the devs know by posting in the thread, right now there's no way to deorbit debris, in an efficient manner anyways...

[Amaroq]

Also relevant - Harv's latest blog entry: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entry.php/244-Map-Filtering!

[tommygunyeah]

Yeah I do, I don't have a huge problem with it and the Map Filtering will certainly help

[Tw1]

I'd appreciate a part that can be used to blast disused stages to smithereens.

Ideally, it would be tiny, and triggered in the staging sequence, but only actually go of once it's 500m away from your ship.

As I use liquid boosters to give ion probes extra oomph when sending them to the depths of the solar system, I sometimes end up with interplanetary debris.

That and my one man munar rescue rocket uses its second stage for the transfer burn, but the final stage for capture, sometimes leaving the disused second stage on a Kerbin escape trajectory.

Most of the time, my transfer stage gets used for the deorbit burn, sometimes even for most of the landing. So it crashes and is destroyed.

Except for when it isn't:

Edited April 23, 2013 by Tw1

[MBobrik]

I did, until my map view became so cluttered that it was impossible to select anything but a random piece of debris. Then I designed ships that could grab and deorbit stuff and I cleaned the entire Kerbin neighborhood a few pieces per flight. Some pieces of debris stayed laying on the surface but I don't care about them so much because they don't clutter the map view and also, reliably destroying stuff on the surface is far more tricky than destroying orbital debris.

Side note : Anyone got any idea how to grab and carry pieces that ended up under water ?

[MBobrik]

right now there's no way to deorbit debris, in an efficient manner anyways...

My best clean-up ship could deorbit up to 4 pieces of small to medium size debris per refueling. No clue whether that counts as efficient.

[erkha343]

My best clean-up ship could deorbit up to 4 pieces of small to medium size debris per refueling. No clue whether that counts as efficient.

but it would be better if they implemented the separatron to the toolbox, would't it?

that way you can deorbit anything, as long as you can rendezvous with it...