Do you play with debris or not?

[makinyashikino]

Personally I love debris but I was wondering how many of you actually try to keep debris down, either by using the setting that causes it to vanish (Ghost debris!) or by de-orbiting it yourself. Or maybe you don't care about debris, maybe you love it! Vote in the poll!

[bigyihsuan]

I don't really care about leaving debris, I leave the indicators off because they clutter the Tracking Station

[Moar Boosters]

I have the option turned on, and I do try and design my launch systems to put stuff into a 70x30km orbit so I can deorbit the dead stage passively. If a rocket is overpowered and ends up leaving a booster stage in orbit, I just leave it there.

[Wabbit]

Debris may be a pain, but it is an aspect I feel needs to be simulated. It adds difficulty, and also stresses the need to not be messy. I have a class E asteroid in orbit, with a small base attached. On the base are living quarters, a metric crap-ton of KAS winches, and a debrs tug. It's my orbital junkyard, on a 200km orbit. I use the tug to bring in debris and attach them to the junkyard. It's called Space Junkyard, snd it's awesome. I am not even going to describe the massive beast used to bring the asteroid into orbit.

Edited February 12, 2015 by Wabbit

[Denks]

I terminate it from the tracking station, or let it fall back.

[Renegrade]

I try to minimize debris (and park it in easy to reach places for later cleanup) as much as possible.. but I don't go all the way for 100% cleanness. A nuke-tug can easily sweep the handful of bits I leave in orbit..

[dryer_lint]

I really couldn't care less about debris

The chances of crashing into it are insanely small.

[klgraham1013]

I deorbit near everything. ...but, I do play with no take backs, so occasionally something finds itself in orbit.

[justidutch]

Do you play with debris or not?

No, I never play with my debris. I think it would be cruel, like a cat playing with a mouse before terminating it. I would much rather just put the debris out of its misery right away.

[Madrias]

I leave junk in orbit all the time. It just makes things more fun. Either we have to go back up to get that pile of space junk down, or it floats around, smashes through a space station, and gives me a free rescue mission.

[Rune]

At R-SUV, we are firm believers in the "clean space policy". Everything is deorbited, and the few things that can't is because they end up in solar orbit.

Rune. Though I've been known to 'cheat' my self-imposed rule and delete stuff on the ground to clear the tracking station.

[Brotoro]

Yes, I play with debris (I like to return to places and visit my debris sometimes), but I also try to minimize the debris I make, just to keep from overloading the game. And if it's 'uninteresting' debris I'm not likely to ever see again (such as dropped tanks in Kerbol orbit) I'll remove them just to keep from bogging down the game. I've been running my Save file since version 0.18, so I can't let too much debris build up or things get laggy.

[Majorjim!]

I play with debris off but I try to make all my craft 'debris free' as standard.

[LordFerret]

I try to deorbit debris, keep it clean as possible. I lost a space station early in the game (v0.23.5) from debris. :/

[Reactordrone]

I generally try to have my staging set up so I don't leave debris but I occasionally have pieces up there that I will send small claw armed probes to de-orbit. Stuff that ends up in solar orbit I'll usually ignore.

[LABHOUSE]

I leave NOTHING anywhere without a purpose, so descent stage for Landers doubles as a lander probe, last stage used to push the interplanetary stage into orbit is a satellite, reused/recorverd, space station tug, or deorbited. If a satellite or probe becomes obsolete, I crash it.

I do not delete debris either, so I have a parachute (with a very tiny chute still opened) going faster than light (went from mun to minmus in seconds) many trillion megametres from the sun... it was a test something splashed down contract.

- - - Updated - - -

I leave junk in orbit all the time. It just makes things more fun. Either we have to go back up to get that pile of space junk down, or it floats around, smashes through a space station, and gives me a free rescue mission.

Just don't let it be born.

[Xavven]

I deorbit near everything. ...but, I do play with no take backs, so occasionally something finds itself in orbit.

Same here.

When I first started playing, I turned debris off in the settings menu and didn't care about it. Now that I'm more experienced, I find joy in the additional challenge of trying to leave behind as little trash as possible. That, and I started reading about Kessler syndrome and discovered that's a thing.

[Tex]

I play with it on, mostly because I haven't had a problem with it before. Maybe I'll get more astro-environmentalist when it starts to kill me, but so far expendable stuff is easy to work with!

[FlipNascar]

I keep meaning to build a debris cleaner... But it hasn't broken anything yet. Getting kinda cluttered between 70km and 100kms. I'm sure nothing bad will happen...

[The Yellow Dart]

I minimize debris as mush as possible, although I generally don't use sepratrons. I just plan on leaving it in a low-periapse orbit. If it is there, it is either in solar orbit or a pretty high Kerbin orbit. I think I have around 30 active flights right now and 6-9 things marked "debris", some of which are on various celestial body surfaces. It really surprises me that space programs are still adding to the problem in real life when we know how big of a problem it could become, and have for some time.

Fun fact! The greater number of dots at the top of this image, compared to the bottom, result from Russia's Kolniya orbits.

Edited February 13, 2015 by The Yellow Dart

[goldenpeach]

I don't care about the trash I leave, I just make sure it's not on an critical orbit(like the orbit of my possible space station), otherwise it stay where it is.

If I used the rocket to put a probe in orbit, I use the engine of the last stage(the one that that finalized the orbit) to change it's orbit a little, just to be sure(but the stage doesn't fall back to kerbin).

[Daze]

Since the most of rocket in real life leave debris i don't have any problem to leave them, maybe just changing their orbit a little bit with separator SRB so they will be harmlessly

[Tex]

Actually, my designs don't leave much debris. My first stages always end up suborbital, so no need to clean stuff there. The rest of it all is just in large chunks that only add one piece of debris at a time.

[Itsdavyjones]

I care about removing debris, but if its there, its there.

[Universe]

I currently have my debris limit set to infinity. Since I saw the movie "Gravity," it's stayed that way.

I find it oddly thrilling when I'm in orbit, and a piece of something that's been in orbit for years zips by. In fact, in one of my saves, I had a booster on an (unintentional) collision course with my space station. I used a kerbal to push it away, but ran out of EVA fuel as I was returning to the station. He missed the station be mere meters and had to wait for a rescue vessel.