Space Junk

[Tarsirrus]

I'm starting to see lots of debris from previous launches build up in LKO and also round my Mun station. Is there some easy way to clean it all up? De-orbiting it is obvious but seems like a lot of work.

Then are there any design tips I should be thinking of to minimise it in the future?

[Snark]

Hello, and welcome to the forums! 

18 minutes ago, Tarsirrus said:

I'm starting to see lots of debris from previous launches build up in LKO and also round my Mun station.

Yep, it has a way of doing that...

18 minutes ago, Tarsirrus said:

Is there some easy way to clean it all up? De-orbiting it is obvious but seems like a lot of work.

Then are there any design tips I should be thinking of to minimise it in the future?

Lots of options!  Depends a lot on your desired play-style.  Different things bug different people.

Some of the things you can do:

Option 1:  Just ignore it.  It's not hurting anything.  The chances are basically zero that it will ever collide with anything.  It's not using up any significant amount of your computer's processing power.  And by default the game won't let it build up more than (IIRC) 250 debris, so it can't increase indefinitely.

The only reason you'd need to clean it up is if it just bugs you that it's there.  That's totally a matter of taste-- it bothers some people, others don't care, others actually kinda like having some junk floating around.

 

Option 2:  Reduce the limit, then just ignore it.  The game has a built-in limit of how many debris it will allow to accumulate before it starts auto-deleting them.  By default, I think it's something like 250.  But that's a game setting, and you can lower it if you like.  So, if you don't mind having some debris, but you just don't want a lot of it, then you could just lower this threshold and then ignore the debris.

 

Option 3:  Use the tracking station for house-cleaning.  Go to the tracking station, then turn on the display of debris (by default it's hidden)-- you can toggle the individual ship types display-or-hide by clicking their icons on that thing at the top center edge of the screen.  Once you've done that, the individual debris objects will show up in the ships list.  Just click on one, then click on the red "Terminate" button down at the bottom.  The game will prompt you "Are you sure?"  Say yes, and poof, gone is that piece of debris.  Repeat for as many debris items as you like.  Once you're done, you can turn off debris display again.

It can be tedious to do this, one by one, if you have a lot of debris.  But it's handy for cleaning up individual ones.  If you've got a lot of debris and just want to do a one-time housecleaning, you could briefly lower your debris limit (to clean out a lot of it in one whack), then move it back up again.

If you use this technique... be careful not to accidentally delete one of your "real" ships!  The game's "delete UI" is poorly designed-- it doesn't give you any clue what you're deleting, whether it's crewed, etc.  You just have to be super careful to click the correct button in the ships list.

 

Option 4:  Play in a way that doesn't generate debris in the first place.  This is a common practice for folks who have a principled stand against leaving debris around.  It's not too hard to do, if you design your ships & missions accordingly.  Ejected booster stages take care of themselves, as long as you take care to eject them while you're still suborbital.  Missions to other moons or planets can design so that they eject stages when they're on a collision course with the target body.  That leaves situations where you're in a stable orbit, and ejecting would lead to persistent debris.  So, either just don't eject in such circumstances (i.e. hang on to the thing-you-want-to-dispose-of until you're suborbital or on a collision course), or else design such stages to have their own small engines and some reserve fuel to deorbit themselves.

[bewing]

Option 5: Roleplay that debris in orbit is worth its weight in gold. This option requires tremendous amounts of roleplaying time, but it is very truthful to real life. Install KIS/KAS (and maybe some other shipbuilding mods) and put somebody up in orbit in a spacetug whose job is to gather up debris for reuse.

 

[FungusForge]

3 hours ago, bewing said:

Option 5: Roleplay that debris in orbit is worth its weight in gold.

 

If you won't be/aren't using KIS/KAS or off world construction mods, but still want to recycle some of the debris (such as large kerbodyne or rockomax fuel tanks) you could use claws to hook the parts up to the station as fuel tanks for visiting craft. If the debris has engines attached you can just put the thrust limit to 0.

Personally I'm a recycler, to the point of specially engineering rocket stages (read: slapping docking ports on) so that a future ship can dock to it easily.

[Loren Pechtel]

17 hours ago, Snark said:

Option 4:  Play in a way that doesn't generate debris in the first place.  This is a common practice for folks who have a principled stand against leaving debris around.  It's not too hard to do, if you design your ships & missions accordingly.  Ejected booster stages take care of themselves, as long as you take care to eject them while you're still suborbital.  Missions to other moons or planets can design so that they eject stages when they're on a collision course with the target body.  That leaves situations where you're in a stable orbit, and ejecting would lead to persistent debris.  So, either just don't eject in such circumstances (i.e. hang on to the thing-you-want-to-dispose-of until you're suborbital or on a collision course), or else design such stages to have their own small engines and some reserve fuel to deorbit themselves.

If you're in low orbit it doesn't take much to bring an empty stage down.  I had it happen once unplanned--I forget where it came from but there was a beefy separation motor involved and it was enough to bring the stage down.  While I haven't tried it I strongly suspect a few separatrons would be enough to bring down at least a light stage.

Beware, though, that to bring them down requires getting periapsis below IIRC 22km.  They will not be destroyed in atmosphere above this point!  The problem is the atmosphere doesn't work if they are not in physics range and the destruction altitude is outside physics range from even the lowest orbit.  Thus merely kicking them into the upper atmosphere doesn't get rid of them!

Personally, I play with the Stage Recovery mod so there is value in getting the debris down.  My usual approach is to make my main booster not quite powerful enough to reach orbit, I stage to my space engines during the circularization burn and the booster falls back.

For orbital missions where I'm not carrying space engines I simply hold onto the booster during the first part of re-entry, I don't jettison until my periapsis is below 22km.  If you're only coming back from orbit the booster won't have a problem with the upper atmosphere.

[Tarsirrus]

Thanks. If the debris starts auto deleting at 250ish I can live with that. I'm only at about a 100 now which isn't much of a bother. Any idea if it is oldest first or something else?

I like the sticking docking ports to all the big tanks and making a giant refuelling stop idea. I might adjust my stock launch unit to give that a try.

[Greenfire32]

Generally, what I do is design my rockets so that there's no debris left to worry about. Either have my lifter stages with a probe core and save some fuel for a retrograde burn back into the atmosphere or send them on ballistic trajectories.

In the event that there is simply no way around leaving debris behind (and depending on it's orbit), I'll build a special craft designed specifically for retrieval. Once I've established that I can recover anything derelict, I simply end the flight of future debris from the tracking station and call that a mission performed by someone other than myself.

It's kind of a hybrid of role play I suppose, but those are the rules that I give myself regarding debris.