Mun orbital rendezvous with no RCS on final approach

[marko dash]

here is a whole series of pics on how i spent the last few hours, but to do that i have to tell you why the other ship got there.

a few days ago i went looking for new mods and decided to try the anti gravity part and the Zoxygen systems. i stuck the zoxygen tank and panels on a bigtrack cart, gave it a wide spread of lander legs stuck the anti grav unit, a few tanks, and the weakest stock engine in a stage below that.

the plan was to float out of the atmosphere, use the little engine to build up speed and the antigrav to hold it, then use the antigravs abilities to come to a gentle stop on the mun.

that plan started looking bad when the little LFE ran out of fuel while still under 500m/s. this led to a long slow climb up to 11million km at x2 because the antigrav counts as acceleration.

once the mun and i came close enough to enter it\'s SoI it started looking worse be cause rather than the impact trajectory i had hoped for i was in a few hundered km counter clockwise slingshot, and the antigrav can\'t do anything with horizontal speed. so i burned all the rcs fuel it had and managed to get a somewhat circular 330-380km orbit.

now to the good part, i launched a mission to try and grab the stranded ship and decelerate it enough for a landing on the moon, as i have never made it closer than 13km, i over designed the actual recovery vehicle. it had three rcs tanks, a mechjeb and ASAS, two fuel tanks and a little lfe. i also used some parts from the robotics pack i had just finished downloading and playing around with for a set of girders in quad symmetry that can give the stock rcs units some extra torque and C7\'s axial and fore/aft thrusters went on the main shaft for translations. i also used a few of the hinge pieces for two sort \'arms\' with spotlights on the end.

as this was going to be difficult to start with i decided i needed not to worry about the stages below being able to get the recovery vehicle, so i put on a tricoupler 3 LFEs and as many of C7\'s \'OP for SPACE\' 1m tanks as they could lift (a lot!). this gave me more than enough delta-vee to get to the mun, which was fortuitous, because i had gotten to the mun in the normal 90degree orbit injection burn so i went into a clockwise slingshot that i needed to turn into a counterclockwise orbit to have a chance at meeting the stranded rover.

i was able to get into a circular orbit just a hair under the other ships, but all this maneuvering of the heavy 1st stage with the greedy powerful RCS units had used up two and a halve of my three RCS tanks, i decided to ditch the 1st stage so i could more easily to move with just the recovery vehicle. the resulting lighter ship had a little too much power from the rcs units and the ASAS likes to fire every single one of them when its trying to hold still. so that tank had just a hair left at 600m out.

this is where i started taking screenshots, take note of the MET here as about 80% of the time after this i was on realtime. i decided to try for it anyway with just the little LFE, the ASAS and the pod gyros. i figured i\'d eyeball the driff direction of the stranded ship and us the distance meter to slowly crawl my way to it, watching which way it drifted and putting my nose about 15degrees ahead of that.

if the distance meter started going back up again i gave the joystick throttle (the joystick makes everything easier if you are used to flight sims) small halve second burps, this kept me closing at roughly .5m/s and sometimes as low as .1 in 6 seconds (watched the MET). as i got within visual range i noticed the other ship spinning rapidly, when i got the rescue ship to within 100m i switched to the stranded ship to try and stop the spin, i couldn\'t. also one of the kerbals were dead, the other two were grey and the Zoxy tank was at half full, i guess despite the 8 panels they must had been in the darkside too long and almost ran out. ( i kinda wish they had been in the dark when i got there so i could see if my little spotlight arm works) as i couldn\'t stop their spin and without rcs i couldn\'t mach axis\' and spin i decided to bump them which was about where i took the last screenshot, after the bump the rescue ship seemed to also get the spinning problem and even turning on mechjeb\'s kill rot didn\'t help.

TL:DR PICTURE TIME