Does manual debris despawn?

[Sokar408]

I'm playing with RemoteTech 2, and I'm getting tired as hell scrolling through the list of vessels, given that 95% of them are satellites. If I set them as debris manually, will the game despawn them as normal debris, or will they preset?

[Xannari Ferrows]

You can set them all to the same category, then choose to hide anything of that category through the Tracking Station.

[SanderB]

in settings there is a setting for how many pieces of debris there need to be before the game starts despawning the oldest pieces. By default it is set at 250.

[Superfluous J]

Neither of these replies answers the question. I can't answer it either because I don't know.

However, why not test it? Take a satellite you don't care about or don't mind replacing, set it to debris, and see if it gets deleted? You could even back up your save first (just hit F5 to make a quicksave) so you could restore it and not even risk losing the satellite.

[sal_vager]

There is a debris limit in the settings, when that limit is reached the oldest debris is deleted when a new one is created, so in time all* debris is replaced.

*Unless set to unlimited debris.

[JTpopcorn]

You can set them all to the same category, then choose to hide anything of that category through the Tracking Station.

Do this instead there will be less problems if something goes wrong.

To change their catagory right click on the command pod select rename, select your desired catagory done!

Then click on the undesired catacory in the tracking station so you dont see it.

[Reddeyfish]

yep; I generally set them all as 'stations', hide the stations from the map view, and then use the 'base' group for both stations and bases.

[Snark]

By the way, I play RemoteTech and am in the regular habit of setting comm satellites to "debris", never had a problem with it (they still communicate, never had a problem with them despawning).

Of course, I don't have a very high-debris play style, so I don't think I ever approached the default 250 limit. In any case, if you're ever worried that it could be an issue, just give your satellites distinctive names before making them debris, and then every once in a while go to the tracking station and manually clean out a bunch of non-useful debris, to make sure you don't get close to the limit.