Can't manage to make a Space Station

[Luc1fer]

So i'm a noob, and i've been playing KSP for 1 month and i finally bought it by steam, wellhere comes the topic:

I launched the first module of my Space Station (SS for friends) to a round orbit, as round as i could at an stable orbit, here you have both the 1st part of the SS and it's orbit:

Module 1

The orbit:

 

Here is the module 2, i tried to get it to the same spot of the module 1 to conect them both together and bring 3 kerbonauts to the SS, but i can't seem to be able to calculate how to be able to get both in the same spot, i always get orbits too far away from module 1:

Module 2:

Module 2 + Rocket

 

 

 

 

I set target to the module 1 but i don't understand how it works, it has some spots on the globe where you can see grades and i don't know which i must follow...

 

Ty for your replies guys!

[Vanamonde]

Rendezvous is one of the trickiest parts of this game, and I will leave a detailed explanation for someone who can do it better. But in the mean time, one handy thing to know is that you can put the second ship in a slightly higher or lower orbit and eventually time will bring them closer together. Maybe try playing with that until someone comes along with more specific tips. 

[GrouchyDevotee]

It looks as though module 1 is in a polar orbit. That is a very, very tough orbit to try and match.

-Your almost perfectly circular orbit, isn't really necessary, close to circular is close enough.

-For practice try and aim to have your Station around 100km or so.

-Try launching everything to the East around the equator to make things way easier for your first few attempts. This will make it easier for you to have module 1 hold a normal or anti-normal attitude. That will make the final approach to docking far easier.  Adding lights onto both craft will also make things easier when you get closer.

-It might be easiest if you begin with by matching only one side of the target orbit, either the highest or the lowest, and have the other side of your orbit higher or lower than your targets orbit.  You will wind up either catching up on your target, or having it catch up to you... play around with the time warp and you'll see what I'm trying to say.

-You should put more than one set of thrusters on your space craft. 1 set of 4 thrusters on each end of the space-craft for a total of 8 thrusters should do it. You can mess around making sure they are equal distance from the space-crafts Centre Of Mass ( COM ) but for this just having them at each end of the spacecraft doing the docking is enough.

-The "globe thing" with the markers on it is your Artificial horizon, or as most call it the 'Navigation Ball',  For a description of the Nav-Ball, look up Scott Manley on You-Tube. He explains things quite well.

-You can get quite a few tips from the in-game tutorial

-Keep flying!

Cheers

Edited March 29, 2018 by GrouchyDevotee

[bewing]

Yes, rendezvous is one of the top 5 hardest things in the game. And (as Grouchy said) matching a polar orbit is harder still. Docking is one of the other top 5 hardest things. And now here you have all of them to do.

So basically, you need to absorb a rendezvous tutorial. And then you need to practice. And then you need to absorb a docking tutorial, and then you need to practice. There are tutorials in the game itself, but until you've twigged to the main concepts, the in-game tutorials will be basically impossible to do. They are not the best tutorials out there either, but at least they are hands-on and completely interactive.

If you do a search on the forums for "rendezvous tutorial", you will find literally dozens of them. Some are quite good, but I can't recommend any particular one. The key concepts are: burning retrograde in target mode, and pushing the prograde and retrograde markers around on your navball.

Once you have achieved rendezvous, your ships will drift apart again over time unless you dock them. Docking is similar to rendezvous -- navball in target mode, get to zero relative velocity, aim at the target docking port, give it a little gas, drift a lot closer, zero out your velocity, and repeat. There are additional steps to make things easier -- pointing the target docking port at the incoming vessel, using linear RCS, turning off rotational RCS when you build your vessel.

So, as I said, my real advice is to start a sandbox game, use SetOrbit to cheat a target vessel into an equatorial orbit (do you know how to use the Debug menu?), watch some tutorials, and then practice for a week doing rendezvous and docking. Once you have the fundamentals down, then return to this current game of yours and try out what you've learned.

But if I'm just going to try to tell you what to do ... your ship looks almost big and powerful enough to do the job, so that's good.

So ... 1) Wait until your station is about 3 to 4 minutes before passing straight overhead. This might mean waiting almost 6 hours.
2) Put your ship on the launchpad, like in the pic.
3) In map mode, doubleclick to target the station.
4) Set your navball to "Target" mode.
5) Turn on SAS, and leave it locked pointing straight up.
6) Launch straight up, and burn until your Ap is 20 or 30km above the station.
7) Set your SAS to "retrograde".
8) Coast for about a minute.
9) Go to full throttle and burn like hell until your relative velocity on your navball goes to zero. It'll start at a couple thousand m/s, so it will take some serious thrusting. Stage as necessary.

If you can manage to follow those steps, you should end up within 100km of your target, in a very similar orbit -- but the distance depends a lot on your timing, and how well you control your throttle.

Then hopefully you have SAS targeting capability, so click that. Burn a bit, depending on how far you are from your target. When you get a lot closer, burn a bit in retrograde mode until your relative velocity is zero, and repeat.

 

Edited March 29, 2018 by bewing

[Luc1fer]

1 hour ago, bewing said:

Yes, rendezvous is one of the top 5 hardest things in the game. And (as Grouchy said) matching a polar orbit is harder still. Docking is one of the other top 5 hardest things. And now here you have all of them to do.

So basically, you need to absorb a rendezvous tutorial. And then you need to practice. And then you need to absorb a docking tutorial, and then you need to practice. There are tutorials in the game itself, but until you've twigged to the main concepts, the in-game tutorials will be basically impossible to do. They are not the best tutorials out there either, but at least they are hands-on and completely interactive.

If you do a search on the forums for "rendezvous tutorial", you will find literally dozens of them. Some are quite good, but I can't recommend any particular one. The key concepts are: burning retrograde in target mode, and pushing the prograde and retrograde markers around on your navball.

Once you have achieved rendezvous, your ships will drift apart again over time unless you dock them. Docking is similar to rendezvous -- navball in target mode, get to zero relative velocity, aim at the target docking port, give it a little gas, drift a lot closer, zero out your velocity, and repeat. There are additional steps to make things easier -- pointing the target docking port at the incoming vessel, using linear RCS, turning off rotational RCS when you build your vessel.

So, as I said, my real advice is to start a sandbox game, use SetOrbit to cheat a target vessel into an equatorial orbit (do you know how to use the Debug menu?), watch some tutorials, and then practice for a week doing rendezvous and docking. Once you have the fundamentals down, then return to this current game of yours and try out what you've learned.

But if I'm just going to try to tell you what to do ... your ship looks almost big and powerful enough to do the job, so that's good.

So ... 1) Wait until your station is about 3 to 4 minutes before passing straight overhead. This might mean waiting almost 6 hours.
2) Put your ship on the launchpad, like in the pic.
3) In map mode, doubleclick to target the station.
4) Set your navball to "Target" mode.
5) Turn on SAS, and leave it locked pointing straight up.
6) Launch straight up, and burn until your Ap is 20 or 30km above the station.
7) Set your SAS to "retrograde".
8) Coast for about a minute.
9) Go to full throttle and burn like hell until your relative velocity on your navball goes to zero. It'll start at a couple thousand m/s, so it will take some serious thrusting. Stage as necessary.

If you can manage to follow those steps, you should end up within 100km of your target, in a very similar orbit -- but the distance depends a lot on your timing, and how well you control your throttle.

Then hopefully you have SAS targeting capability, so click that. Burn a bit, depending on how far you are from your target. When you get a lot closer, burn a bit in retrograde mode until your relative velocity is zero, and repeat.

 

 

8 hours ago, GrouchyDevotee said:

It looks as though module 1 is in a polar orbit. That is a very, very tough orbit to try and match.

-Your almost perfectly circular orbit, isn't really necessary, close to circular is close enough.

-For practice try and aim to have your Station around 100km or so.

-Try launching everything to the East around the equator to make things way easier for your first few attempts. This will make it easier for you to have module 1 hold a normal or anti-normal attitude. That will make the final approach to docking far easier.  Adding lights onto both craft will also make things easier when you get closer.

-It might be easiest if you begin with by matching only one side of the target orbit, either the highest or the lowest, and have the other side of your orbit higher or lower than your targets orbit.  You will wind up either catching up on your target, or having it catch up to you... play around with the time warp and you'll see what I'm trying to say.

-You should put more than one set of thrusters on your space craft. 1 set of 4 thrusters on each end of the space-craft for a total of 8 thrusters should do it. You can mess around making sure they are equal distance from the space-crafts Centre Of Mass ( COM ) but for this just having them at each end of the spacecraft doing the docking is enough.

-The "globe thing" with the markers on it is your Artificial horizon, or as most call it the 'Navigation Ball',  For a description of the Nav-Ball, look up Scott Manley on You-Tube. He explains things quite well.

-You can get quite a few tips from the in-game tutorial

-Keep flying!

Cheers

 

12 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Rendezvous is one of the trickiest parts of this game, and I will leave a detailed explanation for someone who can do it better. But in the mean time, one handy thing to know is that you can put the second ship in a slightly higher or lower orbit and eventually time will bring them closer together. Maybe try playing with that until someone comes along with more specific tips. 

TY guys, i'm extremely near of success

 

[korniton]

I had problems with that too, after learning how it´s done...I found out about Mechjeb 2...It´s an autopilot mod that makes life a lot easier. Circulize orbit, than use mechjeb for rendevouz + docking.

 

Good luck fella

[Rocket In My Pocket]

"Nothing good ever comes easy."

Learn to do it yourself, the feeling of satisfaction will far outweigh the time invested.

This is how I learned, just follow along step-by-step. You will be doing it with your eyes closed before you know it, it's simple really!

(Disclaimer: No, this isn't the "best" or "only" way to do it. There are lots of approaches and different situations will make it more or less efficient to do it a certain way. However this is the easiest one to learn, and can serve as a jumping off point to learn the other methods. See this thread for some other excellent illustrated tutorials explaining several types of rendezvous.)

Edited March 29, 2018 by Rocket In My Pocket

[RedPandaz]

Hey. I've been playing for 2 years and just figured out orbital rendezvous. Don't be worried if you can't do it withing a month

[Geonovast]

2 hours ago, Juanlu16 said:

TY guys, i'm extremely near of success

This is where RCS can really help, if you have it on your ship.  Stay in map mode, and you can hover over those arrows, and it will show you how close your ships get, and their relative velocity.  Right click, and the numbers will stay after you move your mouse away.

With RCS off, set your SAS to prograde.  Turn RCS on.  You can then tap 'H' and 'N' to make very small adjustments to your encounter without actually burning your main engine.

If you're too far off still, hover over the AN and DN on the map.  This will show you how different your orbits' inclinations are, and you can adjust that by burning or at the AN or DN.  (use a manuever node for this.  Set the node at the AN or DN, and drag the or markers until your AN/DN reads as close to 0 as you can get), then go back to your prograde/retrograde adjustment.

[Geonovast]

Oh, and remember that waiting several orbits can be extremely helpful.  It can save fuel on the encounter burn, as well as keep relative velocity to a minimum.  To set manuever nodes for future orbits, just right click on the node, and you'll get two blue buttons.  + for next orbit, - for previous orbit.  The arrows will move when you change to future orbits.

[XtraChrisP]

A few things to keep in mind:

If your target is ahead of you, make your orbit Ap and Pe lower than your target's (remaining above atmosphere, of course)

If your target is behind you, make your orbit Ap/Pe higher than your target's.

When you get close and are burning off closure velocity, you push the retrograde marker and pull the prograde marker.  While burning, push the retrograde marker around to place it one top of your target marker and you'll have a perfect rendezvous every time.  Just make sure you stop in time so you don't swap paint!

[RedPandaz]

On 3/28/2018 at 8:43 PM, GrouchyDevotee said:

It looks as though module 1 is in a polar orbit. That is a very, very tough orbit to try and match.

-Your almost perfectly circular orbit, isn't really necessary, close to circular is close enough.

-For practice try and aim to have your Station around 100km or so.

-Try launching everything to the East around the equator to make things way easier for your first few attempts. This will make it easier for you to have module 1 hold a normal or anti-normal attitude. That will make the final approach to docking far easier.  Adding lights onto both craft will also make things easier when you get closer.

-It might be easiest if you begin with by matching only one side of the target orbit, either the highest or the lowest, and have the other side of your orbit higher or lower than your targets orbit.  You will wind up either catching up on your target, or having it catch up to you... play around with the time warp and you'll see what I'm trying to say.

-You should put more than one set of thrusters on your space craft. 1 set of 4 thrusters on each end of the space-craft for a total of 8 thrusters should do it. You can mess around making sure they are equal distance from the space-crafts Centre Of Mass ( COM ) but for this just having them at each end of the spacecraft doing the docking is enough.

-The "globe thing" with the markers on it is your Artificial horizon, or as most call it the 'Navigation Ball',  For a description of the Nav-Ball, look up Scott Manley on You-Tube. He explains things quite well.

-You can get quite a few tips from the in-game tutorial

-Keep flying!

Cheers

I found such a close station causes problems when trying to come from Kerbin, because trying to speed up or slow down enough to meet it is really tough and requires a lot of waiting. I'm trying to push mine from 150k to 500k because of that

[GrouchyDevotee]

9 hours ago, RedPandaz said:

I found such a close station causes problems

I suggested a lower orbit of 100km for practise purposes, that way beginners can use smaller easier to control rockets.

I use to frequently wind up having to do multiple orbits to get encounters with my station, ten or more orbits in some cases. Unless its something large and hard to control there is really no need to do it like this. If you spend some time practising and start figuring out what you are doing, you can start making intercepts in only one or two orbits.

I still have problems getting it right, I frequently make awkward to manoeuvre spacecraft and this will defiantly affect how intercepts and encounters occur.

After making multiple trips to a station, when building it up,  I can surprise myself at how easy it can seem... but after a couple of weeks (real time) with out docking anything, I find I sometimes need to figure it all out again.

[Luc1fer]

On 29/3/2018 at 1:53 AM, Vanamonde said:

Rendezvous is one of the trickiest parts of this game, and I will leave a detailed explanation for someone who can do it better. But in the mean time, one handy thing to know is that you can put the second ship in a slightly higher or lower orbit and eventually time will bring them closer together. Maybe try playing with that until someone comes along with more specific tips. 

 

20 hours ago, XtraChrisP said:

A few things to keep in mind:

If your target is ahead of you, make your orbit Ap and Pe lower than your target's (remaining above atmosphere, of course)

If your target is behind you, make your orbit Ap/Pe higher than your target's.

When you get close and are burning off closure velocity, you push the retrograde marker and pull the prograde marker.  While burning, push the retrograde marker around to place it one top of your target marker and you'll have a perfect rendezvous every time.  Just make sure you stop in time so you don't swap paint!

 

23 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

"Nothing good ever comes easy."

Learn to do it yourself, the feeling of satisfaction will far outweigh the time invested.

This is how I learned, just follow along step-by-step. You will be doing it with your eyes closed before you know it, it's simple really!

(Disclaimer: No, this isn't the "best" or "only" way to do it. There are lots of approaches and different situations will make it more or less efficient to do it a certain way. However this is the easiest one to learn, and can serve as a jumping off point to learn the other methods. See this thread for some other excellent illustrated tutorials explaining several types of rendezvous.)

 

On 29/3/2018 at 1:21 PM, bewing said:

Yes, rendezvous is one of the top 5 hardest things in the game. And (as Grouchy said) matching a polar orbit is harder still. Docking is one of the other top 5 hardest things. And now here you have all of them to do.

So basically, you need to absorb a rendezvous tutorial. And then you need to practice. And then you need to absorb a docking tutorial, and then you need to practice. There are tutorials in the game itself, but until you've twigged to the main concepts, the in-game tutorials will be basically impossible to do. They are not the best tutorials out there either, but at least they are hands-on and completely interactive.

If you do a search on the forums for "rendezvous tutorial", you will find literally dozens of them. Some are quite good, but I can't recommend any particular one. The key concepts are: burning retrograde in target mode, and pushing the prograde and retrograde markers around on your navball.

Once you have achieved rendezvous, your ships will drift apart again over time unless you dock them. Docking is similar to rendezvous -- navball in target mode, get to zero relative velocity, aim at the target docking port, give it a little gas, drift a lot closer, zero out your velocity, and repeat. There are additional steps to make things easier -- pointing the target docking port at the incoming vessel, using linear RCS, turning off rotational RCS when you build your vessel.

So, as I said, my real advice is to start a sandbox game, use SetOrbit to cheat a target vessel into an equatorial orbit (do you know how to use the Debug menu?), watch some tutorials, and then practice for a week doing rendezvous and docking. Once you have the fundamentals down, then return to this current game of yours and try out what you've learned.

But if I'm just going to try to tell you what to do ... your ship looks almost big and powerful enough to do the job, so that's good.

So ... 1) Wait until your station is about 3 to 4 minutes before passing straight overhead. This might mean waiting almost 6 hours.
2) Put your ship on the launchpad, like in the pic.
3) In map mode, doubleclick to target the station.
4) Set your navball to "Target" mode.
5) Turn on SAS, and leave it locked pointing straight up.
6) Launch straight up, and burn until your Ap is 20 or 30km above the station.
7) Set your SAS to "retrograde".
8) Coast for about a minute.
9) Go to full throttle and burn like hell until your relative velocity on your navball goes to zero. It'll start at a couple thousand m/s, so it will take some serious thrusting. Stage as necessary.

If you can manage to follow those steps, you should end up within 100km of your target, in a very similar orbit -- but the distance depends a lot on your timing, and how well you control your throttle.

Then hopefully you have SAS targeting capability, so click that. Burn a bit, depending on how far you are from your target. When you get a lot closer, burn a bit in retrograde mode until your relative velocity is zero, and repeat.

 

 

23 hours ago, RedPandaz said:

Hey. I've been playing for 2 years and just figured out orbital rendezvous. Don't be worried if you can't do it withing a month

 

23 hours ago, Geonovast said:

Oh, and remember that waiting several orbits can be extremely helpful.  It can save fuel on the encounter burn, as well as keep relative velocity to a minimum.  To set manuever nodes for future orbits, just right click on the node, and you'll get two blue buttons.  + for next orbit, - for previous orbit.  The arrows will move when you change to future orbits.

 

47 minutes ago, GrouchyDevotee said:

I suggested a lower orbit of 100km for practise purposes, that way beginners can use smaller easier to control rockets.

I use to frequently wind up having to do multiple orbits to get encounters with my station, ten or more orbits in some cases. Unless its something large and hard to control there is really no need to do it like this. If you spend some time practising and start figuring out what you are doing, you can start making intercepts in only one or two orbits.

I still have problems getting it right, I frequently make awkward to manoeuvre spacecraft and this will defiantly affect how intercepts and encounters occur.

After making multiple trips to a station, when building it up,  I can surprise myself at how easy it can seem... but after a couple of weeks (real time) with out docking anything, I find I sometimes need to figure it all out again.

Finally!

It was tough, i destroyed 5 times both the parts but in the 6th try i finally docked safely!

 

Thank you all for the awesome tips!

 

[Geonovast]

Just now, Juanlu16 said:

It was tough, i destroyed 5 times both the parts but in the 6th try i finally docked safely!

Before you know it, this will all be second nature, and you'll be able to dock in your sleep.

[bewing]

Congrats!

(And geonovast is right.  )

[Dark Lion]

No practice like good practice. Nice work!
I find it's the obviousness of my mistakes that make them easier to learn, for the most part. I didn't learn the debug way first to practice docking, because I learned this before it was a debug menu thing... I digress, docking is usually going to be the clutch-moment anyway, so I practiced with a variety of ships and sizes too, for the sake of familiarizing their respective response times and accelerations. I practiced docking where only the active vessel maneuvers and then opposite, where the parked vessel moves and meets the new arrival. Nearly all of them were using infinite fuel until reaching orbit, where I later learned to bring a little extra fuel along for those... well, more kerbal situations. x]
Try to shake it up with rendezvous as well. Challenge yourself to rendezvous 2 or more craft during an interplanetary transfer, perhaps. Be sure to look at your map view to observe the changes in your orbit as you maneuver and remember how. Or get crazy and try using an orbiter to save some ascent vehicle that's run out of fuel before it crashes back to the surface (on purpose this time.  ) It's all about the timing, and employing what you've learned more swiftly and accurately. Even just trying without real success can teach one greater future successes.

[GrouchyDevotee]

Nice work, SS 1 is operational.

Cheers!