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Have you ever collided with debris?


jnbspace

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17 hours ago, jnbspace said:

I had my first collision with debris today. I know the space around Kerbal is compressed compared to the real world but I was still surprised to have a collision.

I'm impressed that you didn't clip through the part at orbital velocities, how big were the crafts?

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If you use MechJeb for launches and you have KSP set not to clean up your ejected stages, you will get murdered by debris eventually.  I've done it twice now where a random piece of debris smashed into a craft during the circularization burn.

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Yep. If you routinely launch to the same parking orbits and don’t take care when staging to ensure your booster stages are suborbital when staging, and you don’t set the game to minimize persistent debris, that’s bound to happen eventually. 

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Two weeks ago for me. A shuttle launch, with thr main tank having 2 sections.  Front section had sepretrons to eject the tank FORWARD. Shuttle stops accelerating during separation, and waits while the tank rises a bit due to the higher speed.   This works ok most of the time, with the shuttle passing about 25 meters below the tank.  This one time, for whatever reason, the shuttle ran head on into the tank.  Was not a happy camper

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I used to do it all the time.  I had a really bad habit of ejecting the service module right before re-entry while pointing perfectly retrograde.

More times than not that came back to bite me in the bumper.

 

Closest non-related debris event I had was within physics range, but barely.  I had a piece of debris from a previous vehicle whiz by somewhere between 1 and 2 km away during a launch.

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One time (okay, fine, yesterday) when testing a new shuttle design’s reentry characteristics, I did a deorbit burn right after the circularization burn and bumped into the LV. Another time I smacked into a service module during reentry. As for orbital debris, I’ve had it come within physics range (I think) but never close enough to get a good look at it.

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Made the mistake of fast forward as I was approaching another craft for a rescue mission....  didn't slow to normal speed in time to turn my ship around and fire retrograde...  BAM!!! Nice explosion and spray of parts!

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its pretty easy to collide with stuff you drop or trying to dock with. Mechjeb is also pretty dangerous if you use auto land or even to perform to places like Mun. You undock the lander from the ship and tell mechjeb to land it, or you deploy an satellite before burning towards mun. Mechjeb does not care if its an space station just in-front of you 
This can also happen with manual burns but its easier to avoid. 

Random junk is pretty unlikely fewer objects and you can only collide if in control of ship and not in warp. 

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Not any debris that was already in orbit, though I have come within a kilometer of getting decked by something orbiting the opposite direction.  That would have been a disaster.

However, I have had launch vehicles destroyed by boosters that didn't peel away from the main body properly after decoupling.  Most of my booster coupling design is focused around mitigating that kind of risk without excess complication.

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On 5/26/2019 at 5:33 AM, EchoLima said:

There's hard docking, and then there's hard docking. :D

No no...you are both wrong.. The correct term is "unscheduled hyper-velocity rendezvous"

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Once I had put an orbiter in orbit, and a minute later was frightened by some small but bright thing which suddenly crossed the screen right near the ship.
Seconds later I realized that this is my abandoned satellite from the previous launch, orbiting the Kerbin right next to my current orbit..

This made me understand how small and fragile is our green world, how carefully should we treat with our common home that building the launchpad right on the equator was not a good idea.

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Regularly get a little stutter during launch and realize it's something unwelcome loading into physics range. The problem with actual collisions... collision courses with closing velocities above a few hundred m/s are likely to just pass through each other at default physics settings.

 I do wish there was a mod or setting to terminate debris with the periapsis deep in an atmosphere. The majority of my debris in "stable" orbits have orbits that would immediately re-enter if simulated.

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Long, long ago, I had station in LKO when  a spent booster from an earlier launch came by.  The booster was in a somewhat elliptical orbit (I think it was from a Mun shot) with a Pe at about the same altitude as the station's circular orbit.  Thus, the booster came by the station with a low enough relative speed for collisions to happen, yet still with enough of a speed difference to be quite dangerous.  As it happened, the booster just skimmed by the station without quite touching it, but it did splatter some poor Kerbal who happened to be on an exterior ladder on the exposed side at that moment. 

This really startled me.  I'm watching the Kerbal slowly climb the ladder, when suddenly something flashed across the screen and then I'm looking at Kerbin with nothing focused.  what????  It took me a little while to figure out what had happened.  Fortunately, I had spare Kerbals on the station and none of them really served any purpose anyway (this was before Science! was a thing), so the mission continued.

But since that day, I've made it a point to put a TAC Self-Destruct unit on every booster that won't de-orbit itself.  Not only does this keep space clean, it provides entertaining gratuitous explosions :cool:

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On 5/27/2019 at 1:48 AM, PolecatEZ said:

If you use MechJeb for launches and you have KSP set not to clean up your ejected stages, you will get murdered by debris eventually.  I've done it twice now where a random piece of debris smashed into a craft during the circularization burn.

Sounds like it is due to mechjeb putting everything at exactly equatorial inclination and a 100,000m orbit.  Sooner or later you will hit something in that tight ring.

I'm way to sloppy to relentlessly hit such tight orbits, so haven't had such a collision.

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On 5/30/2019 at 7:50 PM, ExtremeSquared said:

 I do wish there was a mod or setting to terminate debris with the periapsis deep in an atmosphere. The majority of my debris in "stable" orbits have orbits that would immediately re-enter if simulated.

Define 'deep' - I believe the base game will terminate anything that goes below 20km, and there's a couple of mods which will try to recover that - and one or two that will have your orbits decay...

Haven't had very many collisions - partly because when I started KSP I was on a 10-year-old computer and I quickly learned that debris cleanup was one of the best ways to speed up the game.  I have had a couple where I decouple a nose cone before the circularization burn - and then burn directly into it.  I've learned to drop them quicker, while Mechjeb is still re-pointing the craft towards the circulization node.

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1 hour ago, Dale Christopher said:

You should always deorbit all the junks >_<!

No, that's inefficient in dV and also wastes your playtime.  The best thing is to have your boosters run out of fuel exactly after completing their jobs which, if that job happens to be circularizing your orbit or kicking you out on your transfer, means you have space junk that ain't gonna re-enter by itself.  But that's why we have the wonderful TAC Self-Destruct.

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