Debris doesn't deorbit?

[baldrick]

Hi all,

I was playing KSP today and after doing a deorbit burn around Kerbin to lower my periapse to about 26km I decoupled the engine stage and made a successful reentry and parachute landing. After recovering the craft I checked what had happened to the engine stage in the Tracking Station and it had passed right through the atmosphere and back out again. When I decoupled it the engine was aiming at Kerbin so if anything it should have had an even lower periapse than 26km so it should have slowed down in Kerbin's atmosphere and burned up (using "Deadly Reentry" mod) or at least landed on Kerbin. There is no way it should have been gaining altitude and flying back into space in the Tracking Station.

Has anyone else noticed this? It seems like orbits in the Tracking Station take no account of atmosphere. Maybe it does nothing but check the position of the craft based on its orbital parameters without taking into account where it's just been (i.e. 30km or so above Kerbin).

[orb]

Inactive vessels need periapsis below 23 km around Kerbin to be deorbited. If you want to deorbit these debris, simply switch to them.

[Zombo]

No they dont. You must fly the part or be within 2.5k of the part, for physics and environment to effect the part. They also have no collision mesh, so you cant be hit by them. Which makes them useless lag creators, and nothing more.

Its pretty much pointless having any debris at all, so I set the debris setting to 0. The game now will just erase it once it gets more than the 2.5k away. Which is a shame, because I would like debris and the risk of accidents. But it doesnt exist.

edit: I did not know about the 23km rule, interesting.

[maestro]

One option is to just never detach debris in orbit, but this adds a bit of thought in your staging to make 'clean' rockets that don't leave stuff in orbit.

I guess the debris is more preference. I like seeing my old junk floating around the Kerbol system. The only thing I don't like is having to delete everything at the space center manually because it causes pointless lag. I wish there was a option to have a several mile wide auto debris destroy radius around the port.

[baldrick]

Originally posted by orb:

Inactive vessels need periapsis below 23 km around Kerbin to be deorbited. If you want to deorbit these debris, simply switch to them.

That is very interesting. I will repeat the flight and do a deorbit burn to just below 23 km altitude and decouple the engine stage towards the ground afterwards (just in case this changes its orbit) then check in the Tracking Station what its periapse is. Assuming my pod actually survives reentry then this would be a realistic way of safely disposing of spent stages.

Thanks.

[Zombo]

I use realchute and add probe cores to lifter stages, this forces the game to bring them down. "Realchute" lets you set how the chute works, and at what altitude it deploys. Great mod, i highly recommend it.

[orb]

Originally posted by baldrick:

I will repeat the flight and do a deorbit burn to just below 23 km altitude

You don't need to repeat the flight. For every inactive vessel / debris which is within the Kerbin's atmosphere (<70 km), you can simply switch to it from the tracking station and wait until it will be deorbited.

[maestro]

Originally posted by orb:

You don't need to repeat the flight. For every inactive vessel / debris which is within the Kerbin's atmosphere (<70 km), you can simply switch to it from the tracking station and wait until it will be deorbited.

Yeah that's another option. Or if your in sandbox, you could do a deorbiter mission, which is always fun.

[Gertjan]

i just use a few more deltaV and get a negative pereaps on my booster stages (using probecores on the central lifter).
the game might not calculate atmospheric drag if you are not within 2.5km of the craft or debris, it does still count collosions with a planet.

[Ofan]

Cant you just click on the debris from the tracking centre and tell it to "crash"/abandon? It works with my fuel tanks, I get a message saying it will kill any crew etc and then its gone

[Gertjan]

yeah, you can, but that gets tedious to do every time; a single sucessful launch creates at least 7 pieces of debris, unsucessful ones create more, it is just a lot more convinient to let them crash by themselves

[Ofan]

This is true, especially if you forget for a few launches and end up with a fleet of junk whizzing merrily around all over the show. I feel bad for Mun, I have been slamming rocket tech into it for a while now.