Real Danger

[Inverurie Jones]

I was hoping to find a way to salvage the bits but have been struggling to get them with the grabber. I may have to look into this KIS/KAS thing...

[RocketSquid]

You really should. They're great mods. Just a warning about the harpoons: Do not use the harpoons while your ship is rotating. I tried with an asteroid capture ship and managed to miss the asteroid entirely and take out some solar panels.

[KerikBalm]

I think I came within 400m of something once... although its oten another vessel now, not debris I don't leave debris anymore: except on the surface of eve, and derelict upper stages with no docking ports in low eve orbit...

On my eve-lander testing save (using hyper edit), I did come within 3km of another upper stage today.

[LockeRobster]

I was hoping you guys could help me in regards to collisions.

I'm in career mode currently, and one day because im a noob scrub I had to leave a mk-1 crew cabin in orbit for later rescue. To my horror when i rendezvous with the craft in my rescue ship i found that a stack separator was blocking one end of the crew cabin and a Rockomax adaptor was blocking the other end. I redesigned my rescue craft with a mk-1 cockpit and attempted some "controlled impacts" but couldnt manage destroy any part of the target craft. Only bits of my own.

Do i need to be controlling the target ship when the impact occurs for it to register? I managed to hit it at 35m/s and nothing happened. I cant go higher that 40m/s or my mk-1 cockpit and pilot will experience "rapid compression".

Thanks for your help guys!

[Andem]

On 12/19/2015 at 5:26 AM, bewing said:

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.

 

So, you "Ghetto" you're space program? Awesome.

[Snark]

Personally, I never bother with debris one way or the other.  I've played a lot of KSP over the last couple of years, and I make no particular effort to keep debris down, and have never once had a single debris collision (or even anything that looked like a near miss).

It's simply not an issue.  It's not even really a RAM issue, since the debris is running on rails and taking a negligible amount of memory.  I just leave 'em.  (I actually like leaving them... sometimes it's amusing, late in a career game, to turn on debris display in the tracking station and see where all the junk has ended up.  It's especially interesting to see the ones that have ended up in unexpected places, e.g. after getting an accidental gravity assist from the Mun or Ike or Tylo or whatever and slung off into the wild black yonder.)

On the other hand, if it bugs you, then by all means make it a game element to play. 

[Wallygator]

1 hour ago, Snark said:

Personally, I never bother with debris one way or the other.  I've played a lot of KSP over the last couple of years, and I make no particular effort to keep debris down, and have never once had a single debris collision (or even anything that looked like a near miss).

It's simply not an issue.  It's not even really a RAM issue, since the debris is running on rails and taking a negligible amount of memory.  I just leave 'em.  (I actually like leaving them... sometimes it's amusing, late in a career game, to turn on debris display in the tracking station and see where all the junk has ended up.  It's especially interesting to see the ones that have ended up in unexpected places, e.g. after getting an accidental gravity assist from the Mun or Ike or Tylo or whatever and slung off into the wild black yonder.)

On the other hand, if it bugs you, then by all means make it a game element to play. 

This^^^ When debris whacks an active vessel, then I will initiate a space debris management programme. Till then let Don Kessler pen a few more papers for the Kerbals to ignore ;-)

Edited January 30, 2016 by Wallygator

[Wolfos31]

I've actually had debris hit one of my ships. I think this is because of my bad habit to circularize in low orbit then ditch my orbital insertion stage and move my payload up to a higher orbit. 70-100 km is a crowded place in my saves. It happend so fast too that I didn't realize what had happened at first until I checked the tracking station and saw a piece of debris with a different name than my station component. Had to do another launch, I didn't change my behavior though because this has only happened once. Flyby's within physics range is actually relatively common though.  

[StrandedonEarth]

On 12/17/2015 at 3:35 AM, severedsolo said:

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.

I've lost many solar panels by doing a de-orbit burn to jettison a nearly empty stage, decoupling, and then turning around and burning back into orbit. Occasionally all I'm left with is a cloud of debris. Someday, hopefully, I'll remember to burn to the side first to get a clear path back to orbit.

Edit: even worse is getting all lined up to dock and using a puff from the engines for a little forward velocity. Then accidentally pressing 'z' instead of 'x' *facepalm*

Edited January 31, 2016 by StrandedonEarth

[Snark]

2 hours ago, Wolfos31 said:

I think this is because of my bad habit to circularize in low orbit then ditch my orbital insertion stage and move my payload up to a higher orbit.

Just out of curiosity, why?  Simpler and more efficient to launch straight to the desired orbit in the first place.

[Tfin]

On 12/18/2015 at 1:18 PM, numerobis said:

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?

Yes. I like to have the claw and RCS before I actually perform any rescues. Depending on the rescue craft, I might lower periapsis, drop the wreckage, and go for another, or I might deorbit with the rescued kerbal in his capsule. Otherwise I'll need to come back later to clean it up.

No, I don't pretend there's an explosive aboard and just delete it, because I have an explosive available, and it's clearly not aboard.

[Wolfos31]

2 hours ago, Snark said:

Just out of curiosity, why?  Simpler and more efficient to launch straight to the desired orbit in the first place.

You're right of course, but I play a lot of career, and especially with the earlier pad limitations sometimes I can *just* barely get my payload to a low orbit for one of my tugs to swing down and pick it up. 

I also only just recently started playing with mods, so now I know my crafts DV (KER) but before I'd guess and I often guessed too low. *shrugs*