I've been diagnosed with Kessler Syndrome

[Whirligig Girl]

This was a fun experiment! Five prograde launches, Three retrograde launches, and also a station for good measure. Each launch had 32 debris attached that were spun off in various directions.

Unfortunately, I played copywritten music during some of it and Twitch automuted some of it. I'm an idiot.

http://www.twitch.tv/gregroxmun/b/619275744

[Thomas988]

Dude! You gave me a heartattack! From the forum homepage all that was displayed was "I've been diagnosed with..." Today just hasn't been my day, has it?

Anyways, I suspect you're using DistantObjectEnhancement, correct? Never really thought about what debris in orbit would look like, but hey, turns out it's pretty cool!

[Lhathron the Elf]

Dude! You gave me a heartattack! From the forum homepage all that was displayed was "I've been diagnosed with..." Today just hasn't been my day, has it?

Anyways, I suspect you're using DistantObjectEnhancement, correct? Never really thought about what debris in orbit would look like, but hey, turns out it's pretty cool!

I thought the same thing when I first saw this!

And yes, it is [Distant Object Enhancement]. It's a great mod, and the flares can be tweaked to be bigger/brighter, and you can disable debris flares as well... It's very cool, though.

[dryer_lint]

That's pretty cool!

Maybe next time launch into inclined orbits as well and see what that looks like?

[samstarman5]

Of course Kessler Syndrome means more to a KSP player than to real life. It not only presents more of a hazard to your craft, but can lag your system to kingdom come. Cleaning that up manually would be one heck of a challenge.

[Bill Phil]

Meh. Kessler Syndrome takes years to actually effect anything in orbit...

[dryer_lint]

Of course Kessler Syndrome means more to a KSP player than to real life. It not only presents more of a hazard to your craft, but can lag your system to kingdom come. Cleaning that up manually would be one heck of a challenge.

Wat? Kessler Syndrome is terrible in real life, but has almost zero effect in KSP.

Real life: Collisions between objects make clouds of debris, until the entire orbit is clogged up and you can't go anywhere

KSP: Collisions between objects are insanely rare, and if they do happen, there's no debris cloud. As for lag, objects beyond 2.5 KM do not get the full physics simulation and therefore do not cause lag

[Whirligig Girl]

Distant Object Enhancement. And you can remove all debris by going to main settings and setting max persistent debris to 0, then loading the game, then putting it back to normal(250) or unlimited.

[Yukon0009]

[cantab]

On-rails objects still do require the game to do a bit. In normal circumstances it's no big deal, but if you go and make several hundred bits of debris it can become noticeable.

For KSP players, almost always launching to the same inclination does drastically increase the chance of close encounters compared to real life. But then it also reduces the closing speed of any such encounters. The big factor against collisions I think is that objects can't collide "off screen", or in timewarp. So collisions could happen, but they'd do nothing, the two objects would pass through each other unseen and untouched.

[NecroBones]

Wat? Kessler Syndrome is terrible in real life, but has almost zero effect in KSP.

Real life: Collisions between objects make clouds of debris, until the entire orbit is clogged up and you can't go anywhere

KSP: Collisions between objects are insanely rare, and if they do happen, there's no debris cloud. As for lag, objects beyond 2.5 KM do not get the full physics simulation and therefore do not cause lag

And in real life, it can be surprisingly deadly. So far there haven't been too many losses, but it's becoming a huge concern.

For instance, I love the photo showing the bullet-like strike on one of the space shuttle windows, caused by a fleck of paint:

[monophonic]

And in real life, it can be surprisingly deadly. So far there haven't been too many losses, but it's becoming a huge concern.

For instance, I love the photo showing the bullet-like strike on one of the space shuttle windows, caused by a fleck of paint:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Space_debris_impact_on_Space_Shuttle_window.jpg

I have always been intrigued about the fact they have somehow managed to identify the fleck of paint as that.

[Archgeek]

Kessler Syndrome eh? Better call half section.

[WhiteWeasel]

Do you even kessler bro?

[Louella]

This thread reminds me of the time when I had got a Mun mission into low orbit, and was accelerating to make the transfer, and I see something purple on screen that zips past, with closest approach being less than 1km or so.

Was a satellite in an orbit going the opposite way, relative velocity to the Mun rocket must have been 5+ km/sec, lol.

[LordFerret]

Wat? Kessler Syndrome is terrible in real life, but has almost zero effect in KSP.

Real life: Collisions between objects make clouds of debris, until the entire orbit is clogged up and you can't go anywhere

KSP: Collisions between objects are insanely rare, and if they do happen, there's no debris cloud. As for lag, objects beyond 2.5 KM do not get the full physics simulation and therefore do not cause lag

I would disagree with that, somewhat. One of my first space stations got whacked by a cluster of boosters (debris) which were in a highly elliptical orbit around Kerbin (on rails), left over from a Mun mission. It made quite a debris cloud, which I then had to 'search' through to find the science module (MPL-LG-2) containing the crew... and then go rescue them. :/

[katateochi]

On-rails objects still do require the game to do a bit. In normal circumstances it's no big deal, but if you go and make several hundred bits of debris it can become noticeable.

For KSP players, almost always launching to the same inclination does drastically increase the chance of close encounters compared to real life. But then it also reduces the closing speed of any such encounters. The big factor against collisions I think is that objects can't collide "off screen", or in timewarp. So collisions could happen, but they'd do nothing, the two objects would pass through each other unseen and untouched.

As you say most collisions, if they going to happen, would most likely occur while you're in time warp and so won't do anything. For this reason I've been intentionally dropping debris on orbits with a 30km Pe. That way they don't get taken out by the game when they're out of range and they have a chance of coming and hassling you while you're on the ascent and not warping. So far the closest encounter during an ascent was at around 40km up and a bit of debris flew past just 5km away. That was quite exciting!

But while I'm loving seeing these things come zooming past me, I've got over 200 bits of debris and that save is suffering. So I might have to re-think the Kerbin belt project.

[Aegrim]

Oh God I dream of a day when I get a legit disaster from an impact just to have to deal with it. I'd have an actual reason to use my stations life boats.

[NecroBones]

Oh God I dream of a day when I get a legit disaster from an impact just to have to deal with it. I'd have an actual reason to use my stations life boats.

The problem is that it's frequently indistinguishable from a bug-related rapid disassembly event. Unless you happen to be looking in the right direction, you just sort-of explode out of nowhere, since the relative orbital velocities are pretty large, and you don't get to easily see what hit you.

I felt that way too, hoping it would create a cool rescue scenario. And then it happened.

It was only once. I was doing a launch, and getting ready to circularize, and then blew up "for no apparent reason". And I mean, there was practically nothing left. I did a revert to the pad, launched again, and during the ascent noticed that a spent booster was on a very close approach to my trajectory... I was like "Ah, now I know what happened. *SIGH*".

After that I started turning down the debris slider in the settings, and also made an effort to de-orbit everything and not create more space junk.

[Wabbit]

Never have debris collision problems. Exceot for that unfortunate day... I have noticed if you are in an elliptical orbit with a PE inside kerbin and go to high timewaro you have a chance to pass through the planet.

Ah, the wonders of inaccurately calculated tick-based collision.

[NecroBones]

Never have debris collision problems. Exceot for that unfortunate day... I have noticed if you are in an elliptical orbit with a PE inside kerbin and go to high timewaro you have a chance to pass through the planet.

Ah, the wonders of inaccurately calculated tick-based collision.

The opposite is true too. You can have a low orbit that doesn't intersect at all, and have a high timewarp calculate it as a collision. I discovered this the hard way too. I decided to do some long-range interplanetary missions, and so I was using maximum timewarp. My low-altitude stations around Mun and Minmus both managed to collide and vanish.

And by low altitude, I mean 40km or so.

[Dodgey]

It would be neat to have a system in place to create custom warnings, say you can create one to warn you when there is another object passing within a certain radius of the current active ship.

Also does anyone else's heart skip a beat at seeing the "I've been diagnosed with" part on the home page before remembering about this thread?