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Debris - Community Care Factor Poll


AlexinTokyo

What do you do about space debris?  

  1. 1. What do you do about space debris?

    • Prevention is better than cure - always design to leave no orbital debris.
      153
    • I need a cleanup crew here, stat! - deorbit debris on cleanup missions.
      31
    • All Kerbaltech is rigged with high explosives - terminate it from the tracking station.
      60
    • Kessler? Never heard of him - don't care about it
      129
    • Can I choose 'None of the above?' - something else, tell us what in a post if you care to.
      54


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In .23.5 I've changed to no persistent debris. I like it, but I like keeping the framerate up more. (I don't know just how much the debris affects the framerate, but my PC's marginal enough for playing KSP as it is.)

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Orbital Lifter Stages are designed so that they get detached befoe orbit is reached ...

stages detached on way to the planet will get decoupled so that they don´t get in the way of parking orbits.

Also, every stage that falls back on Kerbin is outfitted with Parachutes, so that it has a chance to go down in one piece and be recovered, in order to get recycled/used again

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With 195 debris around (in-&-out) 100km orbit I look forward to see one of them impacting either the rockets/shuttles or even the orbital station...maybe one day I'll see an impact (sometime in the next 1000y since the probabilities are quite small)

Give probability a nudge and try out my kessler chaos mod (shameless self promotion).

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I had a few run in's with debris coming at me within 100 meters.

In fact, I was messing with new 4 engines engine, and going straight up at roughly 25000 m/s, and I ran in between the second stage, and it's decoupler.

I only had two ships in orbit, and nearly hit the 4-5 junk parts left from both.

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When I remember, I'll put some retrograde separatrons on my final launch stage to push it back into the atmosphere after I make orbit, but I'm not horribly bothered by the occasional piece of debris. My parking orbits are generally low enough that in real life it probably wouldn't take that long for them to decay, so every once and awhile I just go to the tracking station and terminate anything that might get in the way of future missions.

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I'll just chuck any old bit of debris into orbit. It doesn't necessarily bother me so long as I can't see it - for that reason I just leave it so that you can't see them. I also like to leave a piece of debris as a landing memorial. I know we have flags now, but I like to stick to the old traditions. Apart from landing on the engines. Landing legs are a good idea, or else you'll leave more debris than you intended to.

If I do decide to remove debris (I don't design to avoid it), I grab a few Advance Grabbing Units ("Claw"s) and steam my way into the debris with it. I'll grab a load of debris and slam that hunk of junk into the ground. That's what probes are for, right?

Edited by Shna_na
Added a "What?"
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I play since January with pure stock parts (still thinking over what mods i want/need).

Debris passed about 100m my first half-build Space Station during docking, so now i try to avoid any debris. That happend quite early so i never had much debris at all. I put on stages that go into orbit a probe and leave enough fuel to de-orbit.

Debris on planets/moons gets terminated. I treat it like trash lying beside the roads (or craters) and kerbals usually don't care about it (except some kerbal rocket part engineers).

Debris in Kerbin SOI stays. I build a vessel to de-orbit older stages and deorbited most. Right now there are about 10 old stages in rather safe orbits left. One more is in Orbit around mun and one more around minmus.

With the Claw it should be now totally easy to get rid of them.

Till 0.23.5 i kept the interplanetar debris, but after more than 25 astroids with their trajektories displayed i got annoyed and terminated the 7 of them. Only after that i saw that now we can toggle the view for crafts, debris, astros etc.

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Well with the ARM claw i can attach to ancient launch stages or ancient interplanetary stages orbitng Duna or Jool and siphon it because my launchers and interplanetary stages are very wasteful now my debris full of fuel can be siphoned for fuel. No requirements for fuel stations for me.

Edited by Dooz
Error in spelling
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  • 4 months later...

I've actually been designing a lot of my upper stages to have leftover delta V so that they can eject themselves into solar orbit or towards an impact with one of the moons. My mid stages already fall back into the atmosphere, so I have very little debris in my Kerbin SOI at the moment. Kessler syndrome is a lot less of a potential problem when the SOI in question is a star.

That might change if I decide to hyperedit one of my stations into the same orbit as the new one I'm building, except retrograde hehehehe :wink:

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I try and design stuff to not leave debris, tho when going to other planets, I often will misjudge the fuel needed to deorbit lower stages and use it all up leaving them in highly eccentric orbits, or I leave things in solar orbit.

I have a 'trash collector' ship around Kerbin that grabs any big debris with the claw and de orbits it. It's self sustaining as it can extract any spare fuel and mono-prop and as I've ditched a few Jumbo tanks with quite a bit of fuel in them there's plenty to keep it going.

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Currently I haven't been able to launch anything to the Mun. I'm trying to design something that leaves no debris, but is heavy duty enough to accommodate my heavy payloads. I almost have it down.

There's one piece of debris in orbit around Kerbin in a decaying orbit. I changed it from "Parts testing rocket debris" to "Ol' Rusty". One day I'm gonna go up there and bring it back down to Kerbin.

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My save is quite screwed up, i'm on a point where i can no longer use a 100x100km orbit because the debris there will just wreck your craft. I have more than 500 pieces of debris up in space if I recall correctly. But do i want to do anything about it? Naaaa to much work :P

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I usually just delete it so as not to hurt performance but in the future when the program is closer to being finished, I hope to deal with that in a more realistic way. Sometimes I do de-orbit stuff. As often as I start a new save, it honestly makes little difference at this point. But, if I could recover stuff more realistically, I would do things a bit different. The program has a ways to go yet so I hope for more in the future.

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I chose "delete in tracking station" because I can only choose one, and this is what I do in sandbox which is what I play most of the time. Although now that we have contracts I've been playing Career more. Since sandbox is, to me, just messing around with rockets, I have no problem with deleting debris. In Career, I like to engineer stuff so the lifting stage has just slightly less than 4500 m/s of Delta-V, so it can't achieve orbit. Sometimes it doesn't work, because of the way Kerbal Engineer calculates dV (it assumes you're either always in a vacuum or always at 1 atm pressure), but my most used rocket is a Mun lander that does that perfectly.

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I try to make my ejected orbital stages capable of de-orbiting by adding probe-cores and reserve fuel tanks. However, recently I dropped the debris-slider in the settings down to about 25, so that most debris eventually goes away, just for performance reasons.

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I go scavenger style. Once I was building a minmus fuel mine, when I noticed a lot of transfer stages in orbit with big, almost empty fuel tanks. I built a small manned craft that grabs the transfer stages, land them at my colony and uses them as fuel tanks. Scavenging FTW.

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