Do you leave debris in orbit?

[montyben101]

Do you leave debris in orbit or deorbit them? Or do you design craft so they don't leave any?

Personally i love debris... I have 33 external tanks (tiberdyne) in kerbin orbit XD and about 200 other pieces. I like it since when i launch something i can look around and find something then go " ah that was my (insert fail here) mission" XD

[Voculus]

If it's convenient to de-orbit debris, I will. Otherwise, I let them loose, and never look back.

[UnthinkableThinker]

Yeah, I go against all environmental law, if there is any in Kerbin, I tend to leave everything just floating around so perhaps one day I'll crash into something or get that cold chill on my spine when passing really near a piece of debris.

[panzerknoef]

I usually leave it there, but my crew-to-station rocket leaves nothing, it wasn't intended though.

[theend3r]

Leave it there as a reminder of my past flights, a museum of sorts. I have around 200-250 debris floating around now and it keeps increasing (disabled the limit in settings).

[metl]

I don't technically deorbit the junk, but I do destroy it at the tracking station.

[Skorpychan]

I leave it lying around; I like to squeeze every last bit of DeltaV out of lower stages. I clear up old lifters manually every so often, though.

However, the skies are still littered with old craft and bits and pieces of old missions that aren't debris, and still have use in them. I'll get back to it someday.

[Capt. Hunt]

Leave it there as a reminder of my past flights, a museum of sorts. I have around 200-250 debris floating around now and it keeps increasing (disabled the limit in settings).

one of these days, you're going to have an Ablation Cascade and George Clooney isn't going to be there to save you.

Usually I'll try to deorbit ships that I don't need anymore, but I've still got a lot of debris up there from my on orbit construction.

[Dave Kerbin]

It depends on the file. My most recent 2 careers I've just left debris, it's actually interesting to see where some of it goes. Alternatively I've played a career and pre-career file where I designed craft to not leave debris in LKO.

[Tank Buddy]

I usually design craft to drop a stage before reaching orbit or so they can ditch the stage while on a collision course, but if I have too, I'll add a probe core and solar panel, then squeeze as much DV out of it as possible, then figure out a way to send it to the ground.

[Jart]

I may leave it for a while, especially if it has some significance to the game I am playing. Such as possibly being in the way or the first crash onto another orbital body but most gets cleaned up immediately in the tracking station. If it is a significant piece in LKO I will de-orbit the junk. Otherwise I see no reason for my game to have to track all that stuff.

[Levelord]

I'd normally try to deorbit my debris, even though I have max persistent debris set to zero. I don't like leaving persistent debris on, because they actually do put a strain on your CPU despite being on rails. I would love to have persistent debris, but the chances of a collision event is so tiny, it's as if you didn't have debris lying around anyway.

[RocketPilot573]

I typically try to avoid a debris cluttered Kerbin Orbit, so I usually just jettison them on a crash course.

[nholzric]

I build most of my ships with extra mono-propellant (and a probe body with electricity) with the intention of deorbiting debris but in my last save I never follow through. I like having the cloud of debris around Kerbin; those little grey markers make LKO a little less lonely...

[Ravenchant]

Decoupling on a crash course works well for me, and next-to-payload stages typically have probe cores and solar panels to allow deorbiting later. Of course, before probes were available, things got a bit out of hand. I launched two cleanup missions before deciding it isn't worth it.

So after 104 launches in career mode there are 5 debris pieces in LKO, one in Mun orbit (launch escape tower I forgot to jettison) and a few empty stages in interplanetary space

[MajorThomas]

Have you seen how unstable low orbits really are? In real life, stuff in LEO comes down rather quickly if not boosted often (see ISS). And even in KSP, if you fly a capsule, say, at a 69 km orbit, it will re-enter within about 2-3 orbits.

So why leave tons of debris in low Kerbin orbit? Realistically, it would self-deorbit quickly enough. And it clutters up your game, taxes your CPU, etc. Just delete or deorbit it all.

[Woopert]

I just delete it for

A: preventing Kessler syndrome

B: improving performance.

[problemecium]

I design to not leave trash, but at the moment I do have one little piece of ship floating around near Kerbin in my career save due to an unfortunate miscalculation resulting in a surprisingly minor structural failure. But as soon as I have structural panels again I intend to do what I did in the last version and build a garbage cleanup ship to bring it back down.

[FITorion]

depends.

for a mission going out away from Kerbin to say the Mun or beyond then yes.

for a mission going to a station then I either design it to not have debris or delete them when I forget to design it not to have debris.

[Silverchain]

I was, because I like having it as a reminder, but I've got too much stuff going round in LKO already and the area near KSC was piling up with smashed bits of plane and rocket so I've turned permanent debris off.

[pxi]

I try to drop everything I'm going to drop before I've gotten to orbit. Often I'll have the last stage I drop with a Pe below 60km. As long as I can handwave that it *should* deorbit by itself, I'll delete it at the tracking station, otherwise I'll leave it be.

Going interplanetary, I always try to drop stages in a planet's gravity well. They always have docking ports, so in theory I can use them for refining Kethane in a later mission. That's the idea at least.

[Kasuha]

Initially I was leaving debris everywhere around and deleting it from tracking station.

Recently I'm organizing my missions to always drop debris on collision course, even if it costs more dv. But if it happened that I was really tight on dv, I'd again leave it in space and delete it from tracking station.

[wrexecute]

I like to throw junk at the Mun pretty frequently. Set up collision course, decouple towards retrograde, then burn til you get a periapsis. Mun and Minmus are easy to hit, even decoupling from LKO. Other outer bodies are a little sketchy, but can usually be nailed on your mid-course burn if you have anything left to drop. For stuff in LKO after launch, I either bring it down with sepratrons, or if that fails I kill it at the space center.. I hate making smart-stages with probe core; while it's a great idea, I imagine kerbals using brute force with sepratrons or self-destruct. It's in their nature to make stuff boom. Think they're related to goblins?

[Jouni]

In my current sandbox game, I have no debris in space. My lifters and short-range tugs are designed to deorbit themselves after performing their tasks, and pretty much everything else can be refueled and reused.

This kethane-scanning satellite is probably the only thing leaving debris behind:

RCS and the docking port would have added too much mass to the satellite, so they are left with the mothership when the satellite is launched. Eventually the mothership is going to need the docking port for some other purpose, so I'm hoping that it will find itself on a collision course with some planet before that to get rid of the debris.

[Lazro]

-snip-

Ablation Cascade

-snip-

I believe the word is Kessler Syndrome, and it's effectively impossible in KSP. Unless you tend to build crafts out of Oscar-B tanks...

I usually leave a probe core on the upper stages, so they can deorbit safely. However, in my career save, I once had a bit of debris come at me so close I could see it, and so fast I nearly didn't...That was scary.