Hello and debris question

[Limited Infinity]

Hello! Nice place you have here.

As long as I can ask silly questions here, I will

I'm pretty good at returning stages to Kerbin now, but I am looking for a stock (I've seen the laser mod, and while cool, I like to mod as little as possible before I get the full flavor a game) method to clear debris.

I've really been enjoying the game and have thus been building up a bit of debris. I have tried building a few ships to get rid of it. The first was my Mantis class which I made grasper out of landing gear. It grasped really wel, but I couldn't control the vessel once clamped. I thought it was a balance issue so I went a little simpler and made my Spider class with a giant scoop (I call it the web even if it's a flat panel ). I made a nice gentle contact, but this tiny bit of debris would not budge it's trajectory. It's like it was super massive and I merely made of paper.

Dose KSP handle physics differently on uncontrolled objects? Is it "cheating" ( I know there's no exact cheating in a sandbox game, but I'm looking for player opinions) having gone through all that development to simply bracket to the debris and end flight?

[EsvDefcon]

The best thing to do is to keep the debris out of orbit in the first place.

To do this, you should try to create stages which will burn when you are in such an orbit that your periapsis is inside of Kerbin. This will eventually cause the debris to either impact with the planet's surface, or burn up on reentry. To do this, you could make your craft so that it has an unlimited source of fuel onboard (hybrid ion engines, or code your own generators (ask me if you want to know more about fuel generators- this really isn't cheating, in my opinion)), and use up most of your stages, when you are still inside Kerbin's atmosphere.

Hope this helps,

EsvDefcon,

Defcon Corporation

[Capt'n Skunky]

Happy Launching!

Arrr!

Capt'n Skunky

KSP Community Manager

[Limited Infinity]

The best thing to do is to keep the debris out of orbit in the first place.

To do this, you should try to create stages which will burn when you are in such an orbit that your periapsis is inside of Kerbin. This will eventually cause the debris to either impact with the planet's surface, or burn up on reentry. To do this, you could make your craft so that it has an unlimited source of fuel onboard (hybrid ion engines, or code your own generators (ask me if you want to know more about fuel generators- this really isn't cheating, in my opinion)), and use up most of your stages, when you are still inside Kerbin's atmosphere.

Hope this helps,

EsvDefcon,

Defcon Corporation

Thanks for the ideas. I have gotten pretty good at having everything crash back on Kerbin. I have a few still orbiting at 60 some thousand meters that I thought would aerobrake and de-orbit, I have a few with shielded docking ports, not realizing I needed a cockpit or drone to open it and then there's debris left over from failed Mantis.

I wouldn't mind making a mission of clearing up the debris now that I know what I'm doing, but I can't find a way to do it with stock parts. I'm tempted to fly and grasp with my Mantis, bracketing to the debris, ending the flight and just meta gaming that I de-orbited it, but it feels a little like cheating.