Surprise Space Station

[One-Way Films]

Were the Stations crewed? If that's the case, a moment of silence everyone.

ok. It's over. Congrats on the loss of 2 stations.

[annallia]

I tried to get a high speed collision with an asteroid a littel while ago. I used hyperedit to put it into a perfectly circular retrograde orbit and my craft into a prograde orbit.

The probe passed straight through the asteroid.

I attempted to do this with 2 ships, but alas I couldn't get them close enough together (even with hyperedit) they kept missing each other. Closest I got was 70ish meters... little more fine tuning and maybe I would have gotten them to collide but I got bored and went on to crash stuff.

[Nich]

I was the same way by the time I had realized what just about happened the event had long passed. To make it even more rare I am pretty sure ships on time warp pass through each other. I was docking my lander at .3 m/s and accidently hit the third arrow rather then second one by the time I got back to the first arrow my lander was in the middle of the main fuel tank. explosions ensued.

[Mipe]

I am reminded of these two:

[Rocket Farmer]

Never had a near collision in space. I did have a very near miss with minmas once.

Back when I originally started I had stranded Jeb in a ship with just mono propellant in a tight orbit around minmas. So I sent a rescue ship. As it one of my first attempts at rendezvous I used both ships propulsions to line it up. I finally got the rescue ship within 329m and killed relative velocity (neither ship had docking ports).

So sent Jeb on Eva between the 2 vessels (the rescue ship had a higher orbit). While crossing the gap I happened to rotate my screen to look at he oncoming terrain and was stunned at how large the oncoming ridge looked. While I sat transfixed I watched the lower ship hit the minmas ridge while Jeb and the rescue ship cleared it. The ships had been 328m apart and Jeb was only 1/2 in between them...... My adjustments had put the lower vessel in a suborbital path.....

While I thought it best I didn't realize till I had played much more rare a event I had watched.

[justidutch]

When I first started playing, back in .22, I had a lot of debris in 75-80km orbits, as I was just learning how to accomplish things and there was tons of debris. I had two (2) separate collisions while trying to circularize orbits of ships. Couldn't believe it!

I am open to the fact that they might have been Kraken attacks, since I couldn't verify exactly which of the couple hundred pieces of junk up there I might have hit. But either way, good bits of surprising comedy, and lessons learned about minimizing/keeping track of trash.

[Wanderfound]

Haven't had this sort of collision, but I have (more than once) undocked from a station, set a maneuver node, timewarped forward to the node, lit the rockets...and explosively slammed back into the station. Oops.

A tiny tap of normal or radial RCS immediately post-undocking is a wise precaution.

[Sgt.Shutesie]

Given the relative velocity I would assume said kerbal would be turned into a small puddle of green goo....

How else would they make the mystery goo?

[mikegarrison]

How else would they make the mystery goo?

Good point.

[justidutch]

How else would they make the mystery goo?

We'll never know. It's a mystery.

[Timk]

I've had debris whiz by me by maybe 200m during warp. Of course though, it was debris from my own ship which was in roughly the same orbit.

I just had a surprise explosion of my ship while warping in map mode and thought it was a bug or a random act of violence brought on by warping. But now I'm thinking I may have run into some debris.

[Jodo42]

so, how well does the game model hypervelocity collisions?

It doesn't. Ships with this high a relative velocity don't collide, they just pass through each other.

OP either got extremely (un?)lucky and the game happened to make a calculation of both stations' positions at the exact moment when they would collide or they're lying.

[Zild]

In fairness stations do tend to be much bigger (at least mine do) so the odds of them overlapping during a the calculation step are much higher...

[mikegarrison]

The OP said it best. The chance of this happening was ... 100%. Because it did happen!

If you flip a coin 10 times and it comes up heads every time, then after you did it the chance of that happening is 100%. But when predicting it happening in the future, the chance is less than 0.1%

[Sharpy]

Heh, seems like you've met the legendary Kraken. Were you operating the Klaw around that time perchance? Did you maybe accelerate time? (standard acceleration, not Phys). Did you use the huge decouplers?

Here's what remained of my nuclear tug.

That particular Kraken variant supposedly works by deactivating all internal connections in a vessel, every single one. The binding force vanishes, the repulsion force remains, everything explodes. (what you see whole is the drone that was carrying a tank to attach to the tug at that time.)

[annallia]

It doesn't. Ships with this high a relative velocity don't collide, they just pass through each other.

OP either got extremely (un?)lucky and the game happened to make a calculation of both stations' positions at the exact moment when they would collide or they're lying.

I am not entirely sure. I mean I know if you go fast enough the game will just have you pass through whatever you were supposed to hit (subspace?) or just delete your ship from existance (usually when time warp and planets are involved..) but not knowing the full details for all we know their relative speeds could have been fairly slow and this was really more of a rendezvous gone horribly wrong type situation.

[mikegarrison]

I am not entirely sure. I mean I know if you go fast enough the game will just have you pass through whatever you were supposed to hit (subspace?) or just delete your ship from existance (usually when time warp and planets are involved..) but not knowing the full details for all we know their relative speeds could have been fairly slow and this was really more of a rendezvous gone horribly wrong type situation.

Jodo means that KSP happens in discrete time steps. Time is moved forward a fraction of a second, then all teh ships are checked to see if they have collided with anything, then time is moved forward another fraction of a second, then the ships are checked again, etc.

If the ships are moving fast enough, they can go right through each other between the time that the game checks for collisions and the next time that the game checks for collisions.

When you do time warp, this really extends itself. I've had debris go right through the Mun because I was on such a high time warp that the game never checked for a collision while the debris and the Mun were passing through each other.

[annallia]

Jodo means that KSP happens in discrete time steps. Time is moved forward a fraction of a second, then all teh ships are checked to see if they have collided with anything, then time is moved forward another fraction of a second, then the ships are checked again, etc.

If the ships are moving fast enough, they can go right through each other between the time that the game checks for collisions and the next time that the game checks for collisions.

When you do time warp, this really extends itself. I've had debris go right through the Mun because I was on such a high time warp that the game never checked for a collision while the debris and the Mun were passing through each other.

Yes I know what he meant, I was only pointing out that their speeds relative to eachother may not have been much.

As to the time warp, every time I have ever warped so fast I went into a planet/moon there was nothing left of my ship. Then again I haven't done that since 0.2X

[mikegarrison]

Yes I know what he meant, I was only pointing out that their speeds relative to eachother may not have been much.

As to the time warp, every time I have ever warped so fast I went into a planet/moon there was nothing left of my ship. Then again I haven't done that since 0.2X

It happened to me once, with a nearly-dead satellite in retrograde Kerbin orbit. I deliberately steered it into Mun in order to get rid of it, but the damn thing went right through Mun (on the highest timewarp, when I was focused elsewhere).

[Zild]

It happened to me once, with a nearly-dead satellite in retrograde Kerbin orbit. I deliberately steered it into Mun in order to get rid of it, but the damn thing went right through Mun (on the highest timewarp, when I was focused elsewhere).

Nice!

I recently had a pod on approach for Kerbin reentry which, due to a mis-click of the time button, completely jumped through Kerbin's atmosphere. I guess Jeb must have wanted one more orbit...