Do you leave debris in orbit?

[flightmaster]

Just curious, how many people leave their debris in orbit? I personally turn it off in the settings menu, I don't see any advantage to it and even if it does make it more realistic it just clutters up my map/tracking station views. I know HarvesteR said he was working on a filter for the map view but even then, what's the point of leaving it on if you aren't even going to acknowledge that it's there?

[Cby]

I like to leave some junk in orbit, if there's so fuel left in one, I can go get it if I really need it. That, and I don't care for keeping space clean

[SalmonellaDingDong]

It's realistic. I want the chance, however small, that some flying piece of debris will come along and destroy my ship. Seeing things flying by you is pretty cool too.

[TooManyErrors]

I try to destroy most of my debris, unless it is on an escape trajectory into the Sun's SOI.

[FritzPixel]

I do my best to make sure it will deorbit when I stage. Sometimes it takes planning, sometimes it just takes more sepatrons, but I like the added challenge. If I ever need to leave something up there, I like to send a separate mission just to go up and bring it back down. I know it'd be way easier to delete it by 'ending flight' or turning down the persistent debris number, but since the game doesn't have a career mode yet, I like having an excuse to design a special craft for a specific mission.

[Deadpangod3]

I can't even GET any debris in orbit.... Without it looking intentional yeah, I'm an idiot trying to put debris in orbit intentionally...

[flightmaster]

Don't you guys get annoyed with having so much clutter when trying to select different ships? Obviously the guys who get rid of it won't

[Cesrate]

For LKO or interplanetary travel I'll control the amount of debris to 0.

But launching high-orbit satellites may produce some debris, and I won't clean them unless it's too disturbing.

[hawkinator]

I have persistent debris set to zero. When it is on, you just get a lot of useless junk cluttering up your map view, and the game get slower the more things are in persistence.

[Malaugrym]

I'd prefer to have to deal with any mess I create, but sadly, my computer is too crappy. I must delete trash as it's spawned.

[Temstar]

Debris, particularly debris cloud created from spent boosters blowing up is a serious problem in real life so I imagine doing the same in the upcoming career mode would incur some kind of penalty. Never mind the fact that docking is hard enough without also having do a Han Solo at the same time dodging spent stages around your station. So I design launch vehicle with some kind of engineering to make sure all rocket stages end up on suborbital trajectory. To test this I need debris setting to be on.

[Noticeably FAT]

Yeah, it stays in orbit until it becomes too much of a PITA to deal with. If it's just a couple pieces getting in the way of selecting a ship I'll end the flights, any more and I'll clear it all.

[katateochi]

I always design my rockets to either drop stages on a decaying orbit, or have remote-tech gear (and a little space fuel) on stages that will be dropped in orbit so I can de-orbit them later. I don't have any debris in orbit, but the surface of Mun is a bit of a mess as its a testing ground.

Before the forum kerfuffle I started a thread about "the clean space act" which was about this, wrote a story to explain why it was so important too, guess that thread got burned up on forum re-entry too, oh well.

[Christian365]

The orbital-injection stages on my rockets are designed to crash into the planet/moon it's orbiting. I put probe bodies on them and leave some extra fuel so that I could de-orbit them and leave their payload in orbit.

The only debris you can see on my tracking station are the ones from missions that I had to eject those stages due to loss of fuel/etc.

[Echostatic]

I keep my space like I keep my room. Messy and disorganized. Feels like home up there.

[Tfin]

I try to avoid leaving stuff out there, but there are a few spent stages in elliptical orbits from early Munshots, and one entire (unkerballed) ship that fell apart when I throttled up to quickly is creating a debris ring around Kerbin, not quite threatening my space station.

Then there are rover bits near a Munar crater, and a poorly planned rescue mission and a poorly planned rescue-the-rescue-mission mission, both in bad orbits.

They'll all get deleted when there's a usable career mode, I suppose. Until then, they are part of the story.

[chainedlupine]

I wouldn't care about debris if it wasn't for the fact that the orbital map UI breaks down rapidly if you have more than a few orbital tracks near each other.

Five spent boosters marked as debris will clutter up the display and prevent me from either selecting real ships, or adding maneuver nodes along my orbital path.

So for this reason, I make sure to get rid of debris. I use the methods mentioned before, though the probe method is annoying in that I sometimes end up with Rocket Name Probe Probe and so on in my orbital map view.

[ThatBum]

I try to eject stages while I'm still on a suborbital trajectory. If it's unavoidable to leave something in orbit, I include retrorockets or even remote control on the ejected stage to deorbit it. I haven't needed to leave a stage in solar orbit when going to another planet, my cruise stages have enough dV to get anywhere without getting rid of them.

[NeoMorph]

Don't you guys get annoyed with having so much clutter when trying to select different ships? Obviously the guys who get rid of it won't

I did for sure... then I got Haystack and now debris doesn't bother me in the slightest... well, except for that time that empty tank knocked a solar panel off my ship. Was definitely a "scream like a girl" time for a second when I thought it was going to hit the main ship.

[Dusty44]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22253966 In today's news, also how cool would it be to have the harpoon thing in this article to remove debris. Edited April 23, 2013 by Dusty44

[Guest trolling trains]

i would if my computer could handle the game good

[superm18]

I NEVER! leave debries! Not on planets! Not on moons! Not in ANY orbit. i'm a freak, but my mom loves me!

[llamatoes]

I leave too much Debris in orbit, so my station has about 20 pieces of debris there.

[ROFLCopter64bit]

It's realistic. I want the chance, however small, that some flying piece of debris will come along and destroy my ship. Seeing things flying by you is pretty cool too.

Yes, yesyesyesyesyes. That would be awesome.

[Brotoro]

Lately I've been trying to make sure everything reenters or crashes, just because that adds to the challenge. And I've been trying to make things as completely reusable as possible, just because it makes things harder as well. But I'm not OCD about it. If something accidentally gets left in orbit, I don't mount major missions to remove it (and then mount major missions to remove the debris accidentally created in THAT mission). That way lies madness. I have no compunction about just removing debris by ending its flight or editing it out of existence. If I smash up a rocket during a test flight and spread debris all over, I just make sure to Restart the flight before Ending it so that its debris never happened. You just imagined it.

I do have my debris count set fairly high because I have left various pieces of hardware as "historical markers" at my various landing sites around the Kerbol system, and I don't want those to go away.