How busy are your orbits?

[JackKerbin]

So I've seen quite a few pictures where peoples orbits around planets (mainly Kerbin) look pretty packed, and wanted to see what some packed orbits looked like.

How busy is your equatorial orbit? What types of craft do you have up? What are the purpose of these craft? Got any pictures? Are any orbits of other bodies looking busy?

I'm relatively new to the full version, so my planets are quite sparsely populated up in the sky, with only a couple of satellites and a developing space station round Kerbin, a satellite round the Mun and a satellite inbound for Minmus at the moment.

[NecroBones]

I don't usually leave a lot in parking orbits. Sometimes a few experimental ships, yes, but for the most part, my ships are all meant to go somewhere, so they don't hang around long. So not including space stations, the parking orbits might only include 2 or 3 vessels at any given time. But that's just me.

[Pthigrivi]

I'm pretty diligent but there's a lot going on in there. I've got a little over a hundred flights without flags tracking from place to place in the system, but at any given time there are usually about 5 to 10 vessels in LKO. There are two refueling stations, one for LFO and a xenon bus station, there's a big multi-asteroid station under construction at the moment and usually a big interplanetary vessel or two in the works, with various tugs and shuttles hopping in and out for rendezvous. For clarity the big things are spaced apart by 10k in circular orbits, with rendezvous lanes at 5k increments in between.

Edited July 11, 2014 by Pthigrivi

[Kerbal01]

12 sats in a low inclination orbit 6 in a 200 km equitorial, 6 in a 400 km equatorial. 2 launches.

[Sky_walker]

LKO: 4

HKO (inc. geostationary): 3

I keep stuff clean. Most of my ships are docked with main space station. I also have another station on highly elliptical orbit (Pe: 100km Ap: just below Mun SoI) filled with disposable probes (16) - was about to send them in all of the biomes on both moons, but I decided to wait for 0.24 instead and re-start the career.

[Raven.]

Keep in mind, I run quite a substantial amount of mods. One of those is a mod called RemoteTech 2, which is a mod that requires that all unmanned craft have a communications like back to the KSC. Which means that in order to fly unmanned craft, you have to have a network of communication satellites.

With that being said, by busiest orbit is the 1,500 km, equatorial orbit, which has six comm sats placed 60 degrees apart from each other. At the 750 km orbit, is what I call a junk yard, because that is the target orbit where I jettison crap such as fairings and boosters before moving into the mission's target orbit. There's about 20 somewhat pieces of junk at 750 km, mainly fuel tanks that have been jettisoned from my shuttle fleet. Same with the Mun: three comm sats at 1,000 km orbit that are 120 degrees apart, and a graveyard orbit of 1050 km and 550 km which is where old crafts go to die.

[Pthigrivi]

Am I right in my assumption that the most efficient starting orbits are as low to the atmo as you can go? Because of the Oberth effect? Isn't it a waste of fuel to push anything into a large circular orbit that you plan to send interplanetary later?

[LethalDose]

On my current primary save, I just cleaned up my LKO substantially. I moved my "space rock" collection up above 330 km, and all thats below that right now are two stations (Midgard and Asgard) at 127 & 260 km respectively.

Don't have much of a graveyard right now, I try to deorbit as much as possible. I figure that'll change if/when I reinstall RT2, though I think I may just wait until I start a new 0.24 game for that. Man, they got it re-supported at a really awkward time, didn't they...

Am I right in my assumption that the most efficient starting orbits are as low to the atmo as you can go? Because of the Oberth effect? Isn't it a waste of fuel to push anything into a large circular orbit that you plan to send interplanetary later?

Yup. That's why "parking" orbits are so low. However, stations are usually a bit above that (mostly to stay out of the way, and easier docking)

[Docsprock]

While I was practicing getting circular orbits, I had 13 kerbals in 13 craft in orbit around Kerbin. One was in retrograde, and 2 were in opposite polar orbits.

Early in Career mode, I can have several ships in orbit around Minmus. Then bring them down one-at-a-time to collect their SCIENCE.

[ArmchairGravy]

Busy enough to have made this:

Those asteroid orbits can really get confusing when I start stacking them up. As far as parking orbits go, I think my record is 6. One space station and 5 ships/probes waiting for a window. Once those LV-N's unlock I get a mess of stuff ready to head out.

[theend3r]

Very busy, most of it is debris, though:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

In my career game my entire LKO to MKO is littered with debris and only a couple of satellites.

But in my sandbox game, it's even worse. Due to testing and building a functioning [RETRACTED], a massive 'Buzz saw' of debris has been flung out into the solar system, at a 45 degree angle to kerbin's plane and prograde, about 250 prices of debris are set to encounter Jool, and about 5 to encounter eve in a few orbits. Back at kerbin, there is a massive amount of elliptical orbits varying from 1000x200 to 83000x190 (this was the debris which didn't escape) and theirs about 30 debris in these orbits.

By the way, the craft only had ~300 parts

[Illumia-Star]

My game is relatively quiet. Mostly it's littered with satellite after satellite, space telescopes, and two space stations--but apart from that it's relatively junk free!

<iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/of9Ba/embed"></iframe>

[Sanguine]

I've got over 200 pieces of debris from 'decomissioning' of spaceships and rockets in Low Kerbal Orbit, most around the 130km mark. I've actually started to have to anticipate the coming debris cloud so I don't launch into it. I have launched into it on two occasions, but the only casualties were two solar sails.

[sndrtj]

This:

My LKO orbit is quite cluttered. That's because of my (x)KPS network of 16 satellites mostly in ~72km circular orbits at different inclinations. One of them is actually going retrograde. I do wonder how long this will go OK tho. I often see things zipping by extremely close (~10km distant) at a few kilometers per second. The debris field is, unlike one would think, mainly the result of disintegration of two satellites (unrelated to the KPS network). All my newer probes have enough fuel or RCS to safely deorbit, but I guess I could use a garbage collector vehicle

[Sanguine]

You sir, win approval.