Show off your Debris Near Misses here!

[AlamoVampire]

The rules are simple. Any near miss by debris in orbit. Does not matter if the debris has been there for minutes or hours or days or years, any debris counts, so long as it is a near miss. Pictures are a bonus!

Okay, I will start the fun. I was putting a lander into high kerbin orbit, just over 600km up and I shed my ascent stage. It started to coast ahead of me, got to about 400 or so meters ahead of me in orbit. I thought hey, thats no biggie, it should dip lower as its on a high suborbital trajectory. Oh boy was I wrong! I throttled up for circularizing the orbit, and had a close encounter of the debris kind! Missed by maybe 100 meters.

[astropapi1]

That's what you call an accidental rendevouz. I was testing out a crew shuttle, and just before circularization, I noticed this piece of debris whip past me at ~2 km. It was the ascent stage of a 1-man Apollo style mission.

It's that little doughnut-shaped thingie he's taking off on.

Not exactly a near miss, but it was great to come this close completely by accident to another ship.

[AlamoVampire]

with that smile that has to be jeb hehe. a close pass by works too

[Barklight]

On my last career reboot I started using RT2 and set up a comm-sat network around Kerbin after a few Mun launches. During the launch of my first Eve probe + orbital relay, the transfer stage and sat/probe whisked by one of my comm-sats at an almost perpendicular trajectory. It flew by right in front of me and I was about 140-150m short of playing interstellar baseball.

Kod, that thing was fast.

[Col_Jessep]

Not debris but a close call nonetheless. On my Tylo mission I undocked my lander from the main vehicle and planned my descend. The main ship drifted away and I forgot all about it until I started braking. Bill and Bob could almost have touched the solar panels...

[peadar1987]

I've had a craft explode a few hundred metres above the ground. The Launch escape system worked perfectly, delivering the Kerbals safely to the ground just beside the VAB, swiftly followed by the debris of a 400 part rocket. Much of it came down within a few metres of the capsule with Jeb inside it, in a great fireworks display. Didn't even make him blink!

[MiniMatt]

The "It's coming right for us!" moment when realising provision should really have been made for deorbiting the space station's final delivery stage.

[AlamoVampire]

any other close calls with debris?

[JenBurdoo]

Me, I'm curious to know if it's possible to have Kessler Syndrome in KSP. I doubt it, as it looks like any debris that explodes ENTIRELY explodes. One booster, one piece of debris, not lots of littler pieces.

[AlamoVampire]

I think it can be created by launching debris ships designed to dump radial decouplers and other assorted bits into orbit but it depends on ur max persistent debris count

[Deadpangod3]

Me, I'm curious to know if it's possible to have Kessler Syndrome in KSP. I doubt it, as it looks like any debris that explodes ENTIRELY explodes. One booster, one piece of debris, not lots of littler pieces.

If the debris hits in the middle of the ship it could break it in two

[tntristan12]

I think it can be created by launching debris ships designed to dump radial decouplers and other assorted bits into orbit but it depends on ur max persistent debris count

I tried this. Hitting anything with a scattered debris cloud is *hard*. Even when my station passed directly through the cloud of a few hundred parts, the nearest pieces passed hundreds of meters by. I essentially had to launch my debris within a hundred meters when on a direct collision but by that point I had a killsat more than Kessler syndrome.

[AlamoVampire]

Id imagine if you launch a huge debris maker over and over you could eventually make it easy. That said any other near misses??

[SRV Ron]

Aerobraking to land on Laythe and the booster comes flying by.

[Captain Sierra]

Kessler syndrome works by debris colliding with other debris to make exponentially more debris, eventually increasing the likelihood of a collision to 100%. As KSP cannot register collisions when physics is not enabled on a craft, it's impossible to generate true, self-exacerbating Kessler syndrome. Now, it can be recreated artificially by smamming a dedicated parking orbit with debris. Sooner or later, you will ruin that orbit by increasing the collision probability to the point where missions placed in it are at a massive risk of failure.

[Superfluous J]

The link is to about 5 seconds before the near miss. If you watch to the end (which is only a few more seconds), I show it again

http://youtu.be/w8S1CwQ1Nv8?t=20m39s

Edited January 18, 2014 by 5thHorseman

[Captain Sierra]

You realistically should have blown up. How you did not is a mystery.

[theend3r]

Don't have any screenshots but it happens to me a lot. I launch all my ships into the same orbits (71,100,150,300) and never delete any debris so I have about 300 debris forming rings around Kerbin. I was even hit once when docking. By a tanker.

[OtherDalfite]

You realistically should have blown up. How you did not is a mystery.

He was in warp mode. In warp mode, physics isn't calculated. You can jam two ships into each other, but if you go back into 1X, they will explode.

[MGCJerry]

No pics, but I was going for the Mun purely using lessons I learned from my screwups. I was about to make my encounter with the mun, so I ditched the stage I used to get me to the mun and didnt think anything of it. Anyway, I'm beginning my landing and slowing my incoming speed, since I was coming in a bit hot (1.6Km/sec) for a mun approach at an altitude about 120,000. I start slowing down to a more manageable speed and as soon as I start burning to kill my horizontal velocity, here comes the stage I ditched wizzing by. Missed a headache by probably 500m.

Learned: Its probably best to use sepratrons to push crap away from my ship, and hopefully my flight path.

[AlamoVampire]

Okay, I did a test for the whole debris making thing, and 1 flight, 12 stages of the TT-70 radial decoupler on 6x symmetry, took it to a 100x100km orbit, and THIS happens when you do it

this is my secondary sandbox for testing such things hehe

[MaverickSawyer]

Was putting a station into orbit not too long ago, and had a spent booster come within 1 km of my upper stage/payload stack... That was spooky, but I'm going to have to get used to it for now. No way to clean the junk up quite yet.

[User Unrelated]

Aerobraking close-calls are scary!

Edited January 18, 2014 by User Unrelated

[AlamoVampire]

@maverick you can purge debris in the tracking station

[MaverickSawyer]

But that's cheating!