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Jeb KerBoom

Have you hit something in orbit?  

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  1. 1. Have you hit something in orbit?



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Only had one. I had managed to get the maincore for my station up into orbit and put the leftover fueltanks and rockets on a deorbit path. I then proceeded to launch a module of habitats etc. During my ascend stage, I could see a fireball coming in my direction, ramming the mainsail on one of my outter fueltank and tearing it off. I quickly separated the fueltanks and managed to get it to orbit. The stage I had to drop was just about empty anyway.

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Had my first actual accidental collision between two separate craft today. Also the only docking I've ever ruined after the fact (no, I didn't quicksave either). I guess 20 or 30m at an angle isn't enough clearance to start retrofire when you have NERVAs and solar panels, among other things, sticking out on those extra-long struts.

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I was trying to dock with another space craft in orbit of Kerbol... And I had my direction right on the money, unfortunately, I was going a bit fast. I saw the distance continue to drop, I still couldn't see it very well, and then *BOOM* Both were in pieces... Why must I be so accurate?

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Yeah I have.

My first operation on a new save is a satellite in a 80-100k circular equatorial orbit. My usual procedure is a three stage rocket, a launch stage, an orbital stage, and a circulation stage. The launch stage wet beautifully, the orbital stage put it rather oblong but otherwise smoothly. I had waited till I was close to periapsis and ejected the orbital stage. I then set up to lower the apoapsis to a circular orbit. This set up required going retrograde.

Perfect retrograde.

Did I forget to mention that when I ejected the orbit stage i was at perfect prograde?

So I fired up the engine and whoops! You know the martial arts "one inch punch?" This was essentially the orbital space equivalent.:blush:

Lesson learned, point the ejection part AWAY from where you will fire to (preferably straight down to the planet), THEN eject!:sticktongue:

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I've had only two encounters with debris.

The first was a strut end, which fell off because of that weird glitch where putting them attached to bicouplers makes the ends decouple and float around, which came within a paltry 5.6km.

The other was the entire second stage of one of my KW launch vehicles, which I had jettisoned immediately after using it to get a close intercept with a station. A few orbits later the entire thing, which is like 10 meters tall and weighs 17 tons dry, smacked right into the middle of my station at about 75m/s closing speed. No more station after that :(

The bottom part of this rocket is the second stage. It's in 3.75m diameter, so it's fairly large on its own.

58OVkEG.png

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I have to report this, it's crazy. I've experienced a collision during early stages of rendezvous in Duna orbit after a successful manned landing mission. This never happened to me away from Kerbin.

This is the lander I used.

mars1_1.png

mars1_7.png

It didn't have enough fuel to reach orbit, so I've established a stable orbit using RCS. Barely.

The tug ship was in a much higher orbit so I've lowered it down to catch the lander. This wasn't during the RCS phase. The lander simply turned from a point in the distance to a large explosion, smashing into the tug, ending in a roughly same orbit after this energy transfer. :confused:

mars1_9.png

It happened so fast, I've almost forgot to take a screenshot.

Surprisingly, the only damage was to the lander itself. One busted bipropellant and one RCS round tank.

mars1_10.png

I've managed to return Bob and Bill to Kerbin, making this my first manned mission to Duna and back.

mars1_11.png

They almost crashed into Kerbin because one of the parachutes had a problem. They almost died few times during this mission.

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I've had both high and low energy collisions. One of the more spectacular was when a piece of on-rails-for-ages debris from a failed mission to the outer solar system managed to plow through the middle of a space station, with predictable results.

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When I was first trying to dock I slammed into my target at 30 m/s. Haven't had any random orbital collisions though, despite every mission afterwards having to fly out through the equatorial debris belt left by that collision.

EDIT:

And I have at least once, undocked, lined up with a target on the nav ball and then floored it straight into the thing I just undocked from.

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I had a perfect encounter with my station and ended up within 200 meters of it. I started thrusting towards the station and then decided to decouple my last stage and continue using just RCS. Just as I was about to dock I saw the stage coming towards the station. I aborted the docking and tried to get to it and bump it out of the way before it hit the station but I didn't make it. It took out half the station. I was lucky that no Kerbals were in the wrecked sections and I was able to rescue them. Another time during launch I ran into an orange tank that was left in a lower orbit. I've also knocked off panels while approaching for docking and took out a couple of panels with Kerbals doing EVA. One time the panel was just sitting there a few meters away and I wished I could have grabbed it with the Kerbal and reattached it.

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Not hit anything in orbit (excluding docking errors) but did have a piece of debris in an elliptic come very, very close (<<200m) at very high relative speed while assembling my space station. That brought back the risks and prompted a clean up of near Kerbin orbits. Now take even more care to avoid leaving spent stages flating around, and any debris that misfortune leaves in orbit is a high priority to be hunted down and de-orbited.

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Nope, I had close encounters with orbiting debris, but never hit anything (in the latest versions of KSP I always ensure that spent stages either get decoupled at altitudes that let them fall back to Kerbin, or at orbits that don´t endanger anything that is in orbit (or pollute the orbit I frequently use as staging point for my spacecraft ... which is around 100-125 km)).

Don´t want to have any scenarios like the one in gravity happen :D

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When I was learning to dock, I got this really nice .1km intercept from launch. But during my circularization burn, I lost all controls and the navball spazzed out. I switched out of map view to see nothing left of either ship but a huge cloud of debris. It turns out that 1 km/s docking doesn't work so well.

I've had more orbital collisions than I care to remember, but that one really stands above the rest.

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