Positions of stars projected onto the cloud-cluster orbit plane in one of our cluster-destruction simulations. Red/grey dots show the initial positions of stars in our model cluster. Black dots show the positions of stars at a time of 20 Myr, just before the GMC is removed from this simulation; i.e. at the end of step one of the two-step process described in Sect. 5.2. Positions are plotted in the frame in which the cluster centre of mass is initially at rest. Horizontal line shows the motion of the GMC in this frame from left to right, with the end points showing its position at the times when it is inserted and removed, and the encircling dashed line its half-mass radius. The star cluster in this example simulation had an initial half-mass radius r_h,i = 2 pc and interacted with a cloud of mass M = 3 × 10⁵ M_⊙ and half-mass radius of 5 pc, moving at a relative velocity at infinity of V₀ = 10 km s^-1. The impact parameter was b = 10 pc.