Activate engines on spent stages

kerbal-space-program

To avoid cluttering my sky with bits of engine and fuel tank, I had the thought to strap some solid fuel boosters to stages pointed retrograde and activate them during staging in order to deorbit them. However, on the couple rockets I've tried this end up being damaged by their thrust and/or the brief shock when decoupling.

Is there a way to separate the stage then take control of it later to chuck it back into oblivion? Alternatively, can I have it just fire after a set time?

Or is there a better way to deorbit stages?

Best Answer

KSP does not allow remote control of unattached pieces. Anything not attached to your main cockpit automatically becomes directly uncontrollable as soon as it detaches.

That said, there are a few options available, if you're looking to de-orbit spent stages.

  1. Create a dedicated deorbit vehicle that catches your debris, and burns retro to shed some speed. That's rather difficult, as everything needs to be intercepted individually.
  2. Attach a probe cockpit (or MechJeb component) to the stage. This will allow you to switch your focus to it. I'd recommend ensuring your primary stage is in a stable orbit before doing so, as fully deorbiting something will take quite some time.
  3. The last option is to turn off all debris entirely, as detailed in my answer here. That's the easy way out, but without specific tools to deorbit junk, it's rather involved to manually clean it up.

Any way you look at it, currently KSP doesn't allow control of parts that are not directly connected to your current focus.

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