Real Danger

[Spacetraindriver]

So I was recording a Gemini mission, looking for my target. I saw something when I spooted my target. Well not really mines...

It was orbital derbrie.

It came in 4.5km withen my spacecraft! Getting hit by debrie is a legitimate threat. Too bad imgur won't cooperate with the new fourms.

[AbacusWizard]

4.5 km is totally safe. It's only a legitimate threat if it comes within r_s+r_d meters of your spacecraft, where r_s is the radius of your spacecraft and r_d is the radius of the debris.

Edited December 16, 2015 by AbacusWizard

[nosirrbro]

32 minutes ago, AbacusWizard said:

4.5 km is totally safe. It's only a legitimate threat if it comes within r_s+r_d meters of your spacecraft, where r_s is the radius of your spacecraft and r_d is the radius of the debris.

And not only that, due to the 'slow' timestep, most craft will end up passing through eachother without colliding no matter how hard you try.

[DoctorDavinci]

18 minutes ago, nosirrbro said:

And not only that, due to the 'slow' timestep, most craft will end up passing through eachother without colliding no matter how hard you try.

It's true ... I tried to copy Manley by colliding 2 ships together in orbit and in the 2 tries that actually hit (probably tried a good 15 times) ended up with the ships just flying through each other

[Hannu2]

Calculate area of circle with 4.5 km radius and area of your ship. Maybe few debris of million which come at 4.5 km radius will hit your ship. Danger exists but it is extremely small. It is much more probable that you lose your game due to bug or hardware failure.

 

[Overland]

Build a shunting engine or yard bug and do some fly switching..thats where the real danger is

[Streetwind]

4 hours ago, nosirrbro said:

And not only that, due to the 'slow' timestep, most craft will end up passing through eachother without colliding no matter how hard you try.

Depends entirely on the differnce in speed. Most orbital debris is going to orbit in the same direction as you, on a similar orbit as you. With only <100 m/s relative velocity difference, such a piece won't have troubles hitting you within the physics timestep, and will still be extremely deadly.

My closest call with debris incidentally was something like 50 meters closest approach, and I didn't even notice until the moment it flashed by. Talk about a jumpscare! It only happened once during all my playing since the end of 2013 though. Usually you need a lot of debris to have any chance to encounter it again regularly.

 

Edited December 16, 2015 by Streetwind

[kerbyourenthusiasm]

Whilst talking about the risk of hitting space debris on LKO cruising. Does anybody know, if the amount of space debris floating in orbit has an impact on the RAM used by KSP? (Asking for a friend who has, due to "a few" mods, to restart KSP every once in a while to avoid memeory overspill).

 

[Hannu2]

All things allocate some memory but I have had several hundreds of debris and I have not noticed any effects on performance or stability.

[Vaporo]

3 hours ago, kerbyourenthusiasm said:

Whilst talking about the risk of hitting space debris on LKO cruising. Does anybody know, if the amount of space debris floating in orbit has an impact on the RAM used by KSP? (Asking for a friend who has, due to "a few" mods, to restart KSP every once in a while to avoid memeory overspill).

 

RAM usage really has more to do with how many parts (i.e. mods) you have loaded into the game. Adding debris and ships to the game will increase RAM usage, but not nearly as much as adding more part mods.

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

I did my first docking! a few days ago.

I launched one probe up, then the second one. As I was coming in for my approach, poor RCS thruster placement made it impossible to use RCS to stay pointed at the target. To increase stability, I jettisoned the transfer stage. Eventually, I got the two docked, but it required using most of the monopropellant on BOTH probes.

Shortly after the docking, I was a little sparkle nearby. It was the transfer stage, just hanging out, maybe 50 meters away. It didn't seem to be any risk, however.

 

[AbacusWizard]

Congratulations! Docking is one of the most useful skills in KSP; it opens up so many more options for refueling, crew transfer, space station construction, etc. These days I try to include a docking port on almost everything I make, just in case I need one later.

[magnemoe]

My main issue is hitting stuff dropped from the same ship. Decouple lander from mothership move to deorbit burn and ram your mothership then doing it. 

[severedsolo]

12 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

My main issue is hitting stuff dropped from the same ship. Decouple lander from mothership move to deorbit burn and ram your mothership then doing it. 

Oh god I've been there. Sent a tanker worth of fuel up, deposited load, and undocked.

Set MJ to do a de-orbit burn while I ran after my 2 year old daughter to stop her from jamming her fingers into the dogs water bowl. Returned 2 minutes later just in time to watch it smash my shiny new space station into smithereens.

[Inverurie Jones]

I just had 4 Kerbals killed by orbital debris...

I was launching an older rocket on a tourist mission to the Mun when I noticed in map mode that some debris (an empty Mk.1-2 command module left over from a rescue contract) was going to cross paths with my ship.

I popped out of map mode to watch it whizz past, but there was a slight delay in the screen changing and when it did I made a dreadful discovery: all that remained of my ship was Jeb in his Mk.1 command module sitting directly atop a massive liquid fuel tank; almost the entirety of the actual ship- including a fully-laden hitchhiker unit- had been utterly obliterated.

[GoSlash27]

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this yet:

 The easiest way to avoid problems with debris is to not leave debris. Every stage should be on a collision course with a surface (or at least have a Pe in the atmosphere) when it gets jettisoned.

Best,

-Slashy

[numerobis]

From the OP I was imagining some orbital Scottish thing... Now I understand!

What do people do about the capsules left behind from rescue missions? Deorbit them with the rescue ship?

[Gelix]

Ha-Ha!

[Fearless Son]

Many players like to clear debris out of orbit for safety's sake (I certainly do) but the odds of actually hitting anything accidentally are literally astronomical.  Actually making a successful interception of something in an orbit is a challenge in itself (one that many players have to master for rendezvous reasons.)

[Inverurie Jones]

I'm trying to develop a missile for debris-splatting. 

[Fearless Son]

13 minutes ago, Inverurie Jones said:

I'm trying to develop a missile for debris-splatting. 

It a "grabber" type to nab stuff in orbit and destroy it via atmospheric insertion?  

Would not want you to catch Kessler Syndrome... 

[cantab]

Hitting debris in orbit is indeed possible in KSP. That we tend to launch everything into the same zero-degree inclination encourages collisions, but the inability for anything to happen to a ship you aren't flying majorly discourages them and the number of objects is generally tiny compared to real life.

Personally I just get rid of my debris with the big red button in the tracking station. I like to think it fires a giant laser that blows the debris into a wisp of expanding vapour.

[The Optimist]

He 'spooted' debris? Okay.

"debrie"

"withen"

"mines"

*Grammar Overload* BLARRRRP BLARRRRP BLARRRRP

Edited December 19, 2015 by The Optimist

[AbacusWizard]

In a previous version I made a small two-seater ship called the H-Wing designed to harpoon orbital debris (using KIS/KAS), drag it into a suborbital trajectory, release it, and thrust itself back onto a stable orbit... and then move on to rendezvous with the next piece of debris. Cleaning up the debris turned out to be a lot of fun and I learned plenty about optimizing my orbital maneuvers too.

 

 

These days I've gotten pretty good at designing launchers to jettison stages while still sub-orbital, but I've been taking so many "rescue from low Kerbin orbit" missions that it may be time to dust off the ol' H-Wing to clean up all those empty cockpits.

[bewing]

Orbital debris tends to be valuable. I carefully gather it up and attach it to my space station hub to make it grow. Pods from rescue missions have electric storage, monoprop storage, science storage, living space, and reaction wheels. I specifically build my second stages so that they can be captured, refueled, and reused. While they are attached to the hub, they provide liquid fuel storage tanks. Deorbiting that stuff is silly and wasteful. You can build entire interplanetary ships from "debris" if you try.