Do you leave debris in orbit?

[zpox357]

I love having Debris around, especially on the surface. It means that months later I can land at an old landing site and say "hey, that's the accent stage of my ........... That I sent up here ..........'s ago". It gives a save file evidence of a history.

I saw someone make a thread a while ago about a trip round the mun. He visited lots of the abandoned (or manned) research stations, each one had its own story behind it. It was amazing

And the clutter problem should be solved by map filtering.

[Manitcor]

I love debris but with the current lag I get when I have a bunch or even a handful near the launch pad I have disabled them entirely when the performance gets better I will start using them again. I want to create missions where I have to build a space garbage truck to pick up and bring back down all the junk left up there.

[Spatzimaus]

No. I leave no debris in orbit. Most of my boosters are SSTOs with onboard control nodes, so that I can safely de-orbit them to prevent the accumulation of debris. The few that do detach parts do so low enough that the debris crashes down safely. I have one single piece of debris still in orbit, a booster that escaped Kerbin's SOI and is now orbiting the sun; eventually I'll go get the thing and bring it home.

Besides just keeping my orbital plots from getting really crowded, it allows me to use a mod that increases the physics distance from the default (2.2km) to something much, much larger (~90km). This makes it much easier to swap back and forth between multiple vessels when I'm trying to dock. If the orbits were full of debris, this wouldn't be feasible.

[Sovek]

No, absolutely not. I make an effort in my designs not to leave spent stages just laying about. Its bad manners.

[flyin_ruski]

I have been after .19 Too much work to clean up after my self. :-p

[Antaxus]

In my save game kerbin haves a ring around it... a debris ring

[DarthJazno]

I leave it if its a booster or dead craft. But if its just a part, I try and delete it. Those reaction control thrusters somehow always survive re-entry.. I like seeing my failed attempts at a planetary encounter just in solar orbit. I like to imagine someday visiting one of the old Mariner spacecraft still out there.

[Peenvogel]

I leave up to 25 pieces of debris in orbit (to prevent lag) that I like to shoot down with my SDI missile platform, but sometimes I remove it by hand with the Lazor mod.

[Tw1]

Most of the debris I want to keep have a command pod, or a mechjeb unit on them, so I save them as craft, rather than debris.

Like my first Mun lander, which was a one- way trip. That, and the broken leg that made the fateful voyage one way are still there.

I keep the persistent debris high, but do a clean up mission with a sunbeam laser armed drone when debris starts to lag a place up.

[BobTheYoungFish]

I try to not put debris in orbit, but a lot of the time I overestimate how much fuel I need and put a few debris into orbit. It hasn't become a problem yet, I've only gotten within ~8km

[W3asel]

I try to keep debris to a minimum - usually by ensuring anything I stage off either has a probe core and some fuel left for deorbiting or by staging when on a suborbital trajectory.

I have had a couple mishaps that left debris in Kerbin orbit, but most of that either encountered Mun and got ejected out into a Kerbol orbit or I cleaned up (by docking with/grabbing with my LKO tug). All I've got left near Kerbin now is a large transfer stage that ran out of power before I deorbited it (it's in an eccentric orbit so it's a pain to chase down and it's big enough I don't think my current tug can handle it) and a decoupler that was supposed to be in a suborbital trajectory but snagged on my ship when I circularized without me noticing.

[AmpsterMan]

I try not too. Once we can filter our map views however, I can see myself putting a LOT more junk; not only in LKO, but all over the system

[Splode]

I use haystack and deadly re-entry.

If I don't bother to plan my mission so that my spent stages burn up, it'll serve me right if I get hit by one later!

[Van Disaster]

I usually left it turned off because of the map issue, but after trying Haystack I turned it on again. However having just tried to access a crash site on Mun and finding the debris cut my fps down to about 3 seconds per frame, off it went again...

[flyin_ruski]

I am starting to accumulate a decent amount of debris in muner orbit and on the muner surface. I kinda like seeing how frequently Ive visited the mun with debris being the evidence.

[UrstMcRedhead]

I would but I have way too many OCD issues with it.

[Fastfishy2]

i leave so much debris in orbit that.... well im glad theres no space litter police.

[soranno]

I generally avoid debris in the first place, but the last few days have seen a few articles get passed me.. so today I was trying out KAS, Kerbal Attachment System, for the first time, hoping to use it as manually placed fuel lines, and in investigating the grappling hook the possibilities of a mission set my mind spinning.

So I redesigned one of my ships and set off for an object, an inappropriately disposed of (or rather no) spent stage.

The approach was gorgeous:

grappling hooks fired in dramatic style, and connection achieved

and let it be known, I`m certain I was told this ahead of time by the way, DO NOT time warp after hooking to something:

One piece of debris becomes 4

as well as that, it causes your game to bug out to where you cannot end flight or return to space center. So be warned.. haha

incidentally the whole mission was livestreamed at: http://www.twitch.tv/hoshizora

http://www.twitch.tv/hoshizora/b/397568701 is this mission log, fast forward to about 5:45 for the moment the possibilities dawned on me

Edited April 30, 2013 by soranno

[Spanier]

I'm either making sure, potential debris doesn't achieve orbital velocity and falls back to the surface or, if the payload must be released on orbit, I manually deorbit the debris. When going to the outskirts of Kerbin orbits, I want to crash any debris into Mün/Minmus

[Felsmak]

All the time. It brings back memories!

[Spanier]

As long as Kerbin doesn't has The Kessler Syndrom...

[JTG]

I leave everything in orbit. I like to see it when I set the filter to "debris". It seems realistic.

[Captain_Party]

Mate. Necro.

[KerbMav]

In KSP every day is Día de los Muertos!

[Technical Ben]

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 think I have like 15-20 debris at the moment. Most I leave in a degrading orbit only. Those I manually delete are debris on Kerbin (as Kerbals can get to it to clean) and multiple debris crash sites, where I leave 1 section for realism, but remove the rest to avoid clutter. I tend to try not to leave stuff in orbit though, so that helps. Mind you, 1 crash and it's all gone to pot...