Poll: do you suffer from space junk?

[adsii1970]

Yes. I have a lot of debris. I am thinking about a mission that simply focuses trying to rendez-vous with the junk, then have some target practice with BD Armory...

In all seriousness, I use the Jr. docking port on all satellites. When I finish using it to scan Kerbin, I can send up a booster module, dock with it, then send it on another mission, as needed.

Edited June 18, 2016 by adsii1970

[Corona688]

9 hours ago, Madrias said:

But you specifically asked, "Do I suffer from space junk?"  The answer is simple.

No.  I enjoy every moment of it.

Of course you do, why else even have a retrograde station

When docking couplers came out I tried to be pretty about space debris and clean it all up.  This ended up with lots and lots of engines big and small docked to my space station.  When you hit 'z' to do an orbital correction, and the giant sideways mainsail you forgot about kicks in...

Edited June 18, 2016 by Corona688

[the_Demongod]

I used to try really hard to avoid causing space junk by deorbiting it, building my rockets so that I circularized with my transfer stage so that the previous stage would fall back to Kerbin, crashing my transfer stage into the target body, and all sorts of other stuff, but then I realized that the chances of an impact were almost nonexistent, and that having a lot of space junk was actually very cool and more realistic, so I just leave it all up there. It's pretty cool when you go to the tracking station every so often and enable debris visible and see all the different orbits that you once took that left the debris.

[AlamoVampire]

In my KSP I rp that anything that goes into space has explosives on it. Once an object has fulfilled its duty life if it cannot reenter or is stranded in space or on a body it gets the command to destruct. So no debris is left behind anywhere 

[Madrias]

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

why else even have a retrograde station

Honestly?  Because I did a lot of my launches retrograde in that save (was kinda my personal challenge, to make things go up the hard way) and so my station, naturally, was in a retrograde orbit.  I think it was a 200x150km elliptical orbit (I didn't care too much about making my orbits neat, so I just got them close to nice numbers), and had plenty of things attached.

Then I stopped playing that save for a month or two while I focused on other things.

So when I came back, I looked at my map view, saw I had a space station already, and so I planned to build a new one (having forgotten the first was retrograde.  If I'd have remembered that, I would've put the new one up backwards as well), with an orbit of 200x150km with two intersect points, so that they'd always be on opposite sides from one another, and at no risk of collision.  I built my station in the best of ways known to 0.90: I built it all on the launchpad and yanked it up to space on a massive donut of fire, so I wouldn't have to waste my time with docking maneuvers.  It went up fully crewed, had provisions for docking, and ended up in space without much fuss.

Of course, I get to the point of finalizing my orbit, checking my map to see that both stations were on opposite sides of Kerbin, and decided to sit back and relax.  Figured I'd sit there and watch the random space junk whizz by.  Which is when I started remembering what save I was on, as most of the stuff I saw was really moving quite quickly as I saw it, and was hurtling in my direction against the planet's rotation.

And after enjoying a near-miss from a mainsail-double-orange booster that had been discarded, I saw something large approaching quite... well, rather fast.  I suppose the only reason I got an impact out of it was that the two stations are very large parts, and thereby when physics sputtered its way through "There's about 2200 parts that just loaded in, along with 1700 parts we were already watching, and they're going to crash" a couple frames must have had bits of station colliding.  Got a big explosion and a lot more space junk.

So, I figured I'd go try to rescue at least some of the Kerbals.  Sent up a rescue shuttle, got fragged near rendezvous by retrograde space trash.  Sent up a second rescue shuttle, got fragged near rendezvous by prograde space trash.  Stopped playing that one because there was no way to clean up that mess other than deleting way more debris than I wanted to do just to make a rescue mission possible, and for significantly less Kerbals returned safely, because there were a lot of Kerbals in labs and hitchhiker capsules.

 

But, I learned from that one:  Learn the orbital rules of your current save if you've not played it in a while before putting anything in orbit.

[SorryDave]

I lost a ship and its crew to space junk once in all the time I was playing. 

It was kind of strange as the debris was traveling less than a few meters per second relative to my ship. Before I could figure out what was happening it collided and did more damage than I expected,

[Bev7787]

I have tons of debris in orbit (80kmx80km orbit, you can see at least one ship and debris ahead and behind you,) but there could have been many more if I had not began returning used stages to Kerbin.

Edited June 19, 2016 by Bev7787

[Firemetal]

Crashing into space junk is pretty rare. It could happen in a few hundred years or so but I have had a lot of debris in orbit near certain spacecrafts and it has never happened to me.

[LordFerret]

11 hours ago, Snark said:

There's no real reason for that other than OCD; I just happen to like it that way.

If you're doing SCANsats, then yes, it's a good reason.

[AbacusWizard]

I used to be pretty careless about launches, and left a lot of empty tanks and discarded engines in low Kerbin orbit. Eventually I got worried about it, and designed the H-Wing, a small two-seater vessel armed with a rear harpoon gun (KAS). I sent it out to rendezvous individually with each piece of space junk, harpoon it, tow it into a suborbital "disposal trajectory," detach, reel in the harpoon, return the H-Wing to a parking orbit, and start planning a rendezvous with the next piece. Fun project.

These days I just design all of my launches to discard all stages except the ship itself while still suborbital, and use a bit of the ship's own fuel to get the last few dozen m/s to a stable orbit, so the only debris I end up with is single-piece cockpits from lazy rescuees who can't be bothered to clean up after themselves.

[RA3236]

Nope, but I have a ****ton of asteroids because of New Horizons. It's making my game laggy.

[KerikBalm]

needs an option for "No, I don't make debris in the first place"

SSTOs are not debris.

[CG_Kerbin]

11 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

Yes. I have a lot of debris. I am thinking about a mission that simply focuses trying to rendez-vous with the junk, then have some target practice with BD Armory...

In all seriousness, I use the Jr. docking port on all satellites. When I finish using it to scan Kerbin, I can send up a booster module, dock with it, then send it on another mission, as needed.

That is such a good idea, my space station is getting a turret upgrade...!

[White Owl]

One time I was deorbiting a small, low-tech spaceplane. I don't remember what version of the game this was, but it was before reentry heat. The purpose of the flight was mostly to test the spaceplane's handling in reentry, and figure out exactly when to burn to land at KSC. First there was the small deorbit burn, then I jettisoned the disposable propulsion module a minute or so before hitting atmosphere. A few minutes later, the plane was just starting to hit air thick enough to work with, when the discarded propulsion module caught back up and knocked one wing off. Big scary noise, parts flying all over the place, spaceplane violently tumbling and shedding even more parts... It was just a little bit startling.

That was the only unintentional collision with debris I've ever seen. Since then I've made it a habit to turn slightly upon reentry, so anything that falls off the plane (intentional or not) will be on a slightly different trajectory.

[Snark]

4 hours ago, RA3236 said:

Nope, but I have a ****ton of asteroids because of New Horizons. It's making my game laggy.

I ran into the same thing myself... eventually I couldn't stand it so I wrote a little perl script to scrub all asteroids out of my .sfs file, and would just run it from time to time.

Then I got smarter and realized that as long as I don't upgrade my tracking station to the max level, no asteroids will spawn.  So I just went in and edited the save file to downgrade the tracking station a notch, and problem solved.

(I never have any use for asteroids anyway, since the only way to do anything useful with them is to use the Klaw, which is beyond the pale for me.  I love the idea, but have had just too many universe-destroying problems to make it something I'm willing to touch, ever.  Of course KSP has its share of bugs, like any program, but the only really egregious problem I've ever felt was "over the limit" was the Klaw.)

[Wolfdog]

I terminate my debris

 

[Michael R]

I've never accumulated much junk because I constantly start new saves, and I also terminate.  However, I will admit that on more than one occasion I've stage separated after achieving orbit, then collided with the spent stage when I began my next maneuver. 

[moogoob]

My SpaceM Lifter Testing Sandbox save has not only debris, but dozens and dozens of things like "Simplesat - Magician I" or "Mun Orbiter 2 - Strength II-B" at various orbits. I guess I just keep them all up there as testament to my successful launches. *shrugs*

[Aragosnat]

I try my best to make sure debries gets de-orbited naturally till I get the claw. Even with the claw and spent stages and such I try to make sure they still have their Pe withing the atmosphere. Either If I have time watch them de-orbit or delete if I realized I forgot about them for a long time and that they should have de-orbited by then anyways.

[Kevin Kyle]

I always plan my launches to get rid of the debris one way or another like others have said. There is the occasional debris but its seldom that it happens. I even deorbit the debris when I rescue kerbal's in orbit.

[luizopiloto]

Even my mun transfers are done in a way, the transfer stage falls back into Kerbin... but uses a little more Dv for this... For deep space mission is different... I have some tanks around Eve I leave behind when crew comes back... but I leave then at the same orbit altitude... like a cemetery... nothing active parks around this altitude... 

[Kerbinchaser]

I leave my debris in orbit, but I'm planning on sending a mission with claws to intercept and de-orbit all the space junk. 

Oh boy, this will be fun. 

[eddiew]

I have only once seen a random thing swooping within HUD range, and that was a 20+ km miss. 

On the whole I try to avoid space junk, but that kind of planning can be hard at the start of a career. I've had a few of my booster stages for Mun trips make solar orbit because they got a weird gravity assist months after the mission ended...

[JoeNapalm]

 

One of the first settings I check it to make sure I have infinite debris.

In my longest save, I had one collision. Station got clipped by something from a old ship that had broken up in the 100km belt. I consider that contact a miracle.

An awesome, awesome miracle.

Just "terminating" or blowing up your debris strikes me as sort of cheaty. I mean, the LAST thing you would want to do with space debris is to blast it into thousands of smaller pieces of hyperaccelerated debris.

Having infinite debris enabled, and refusing to just attach K4 to all of it, keeps me honest. I'm not super economical about parts recovery, but I do try to minimize the number of extra parts that make it to orbit. I use a lot of SSTOs and try to make sure my booster stages don't make it to stable trajectories.

Sometimes I DO have big boosters up there (with space stations, in particular, I'm guilty of this) but a simple EVA nudge will eventually clear this stuff pretty far out of the way.

I often think about salvage missions, but honestly, even with tons of junk whizzing around up there, the chances of me ever seeing a second impact are astronomically small.

Like @Snark said...space is really, really big.

 

-Jn-

[Kevin Kyle]

I had a used booster nearly hit me once, it was very very close and it passed by fast. It would have been a devastating hit, hence the reason I dont leave junk in orbit any longer.