Automatic delete of space debris that have orbit perapsis lower than 30 km

[HoneyFox]

A small speed change retrograde applied at every Pe between 23km and 69km (function of height of course) would be a very cheap way of having decaying orbits. No parachutes, no landings, no slippery craft, no draggy craft, just -N m/s where N is a function of altitude. Parts that barely skim the atmo at 67km will take ages to hit the 23km wall and ones at 24km will likely disappear on the first Pe. It isn't very often that an unattended craft passes Pe. Unattended ascending craft would be immune since it's only evaluated at Pe.

It's simple and efficient and handles 80% of what's desired compared to full physics for all craft in the atmo band.

Second on this, and it should be not hard to write a plugin to implement this.

Though there may still be some problem when we use too high time-warp, so that they cannot be detected passing atmosphere (where Pe is). This issue already exists in stock KSP though.

[JoCRaM]

lander & launcher

it was a SPH craft, so I launch it from the runway. The launcher is unstable 30km throttle to full, stage, , sas on at 500m, drop throttle to 12 when the overheat bar comes on. wait 'till 20K for a very gradual gravity turn to horizontal at 30K. (or start a gravity turn at 4km, never pushing the craft facing above the top edge of the prograde marker)

[Grumman]

I'm going to bump this because it's a kludge that ruined one of my recent vehicles. I built an aeroplane designed to parachute probes down across Kerbin - a stylish way to grab all the different sorts of Science available. Or it would be, if the game didn't delete all my probes before they could land.

[vexx32]

Well, you could use the Lazor mod to make them game calculate physics for objects in a larger range to make that easier... but somehow I doubt it's changing too much in the very near future. We'll see, though.

[Bartybum]

I'm going to bump this because it's a kludge that ruined one of my recent vehicles. I built an aeroplane designed to parachute probes down across Kerbin - a stylish way to grab all the different sorts of Science available. Or it would be, if the game didn't delete all my probes before they could land.

That's hardly the biggest concern in a case like this. Think about the 2.5k radius physics bubble that sits around your ship. The problem you'll still get is that the probes' parachutes won't deploy and you'll still lose them.

[Boaschtel]

Well, you could use the Lazor mod to make them game calculate physics for objects in a larger range to make that easier... but somehow I doubt it's changing too much in the very near future. We'll see, though.

I always wanted a mod to increase physics range, are you talking about the Lazor Systems mod? I couldn't find this features in the description...

[Zander]

Why make it so complicated? If an object is in the atmosphere and moving faster than 5m/s then don't unload physics. Simple and low CPU intensity.

[Galane]

At one point I had a cloud of debris around Kerbin on a highly elliptical orbit with a Pe well down in the atmo. It wouldn't auto delete any of it. Even when I 'flew' pieces down to crashing, it wouldn't delete any but the one piece that crashed.

Another issue in this vein is if you have a ship in a low orbit that will eventually hit a mountain but is still far enough away to go to it and increase altitude. I had one that had somehow dropped to below 10,000 meters over Ike. It was somewhere between 1 and 2 minutes from impact, plenty of time to save it, but on loading the persistent file, KSP would delete the ship. Hit F9, ship is back, aim the fiery end down and get the altitude back to over 10K.

In such cases the game should just bloody well wait until the ship actually hits the ground instead of simply removing it with the assumption that it's going to crash anyway. What would be nice is if it'd pop up warnings for any ships that have command modules, which are on crash courses with the ground.