Dan Moos

Success! Two keys. Finally learning how to push around the prograde/retrograde vectors. Also, after my initial rendezvous burn, I quit speeding up time. took longer, but gave me time to experiment without botching things. I'm still not completely certain what the prograde/retrograde bugs represent in target mode. My feeling is that they are the prograde/retrograde vectors of the TARGET's orbit. This seems correct because it jives with lining up the target with prograde for a perfect orbit match. Am I correct here? Whats funny, is while the docking was a success, I managed to strand all three Kerbal's! I wasted deltaV getting my orbit coplaner with Kerbin's equator, and ended up 5 m/s shy of getting below 70,000 on my rentry burn! I fiddled with the maneuver node forever, but that's as close as I could get it. I burned all my monopropelant and got a little out of it, but not enough. I made the misytake of not waiting 'till apoasis to burn the monopropelant, so I imagine I could have done better. My six year old son hates it when my Kerbal's don't make it!

I'm hitting a wall on the docking tutorial. Basically, I get to the point where I'm within 200 or less meters, I get my relative velocity pretty low, and then the thing drifts away. I can always burn as to get back where I was, but can't seem to get much closer than maybe 100m. I just keep doing this dance where I creep up on it, but we aren't exactly in the same orbit or something. I have the navball in Target mode, and set to track the target. On map mode, the orbits look dang close. Closer than I know how to improve upon, as in only see extreme zoom do you see to orbit tracks. As a related question, when in target mode, what do the prograde/retrograde bugs mean exactly? Does it refer to those vectors in reference to the target's orbit, such that in a perfectly shared orbit, those bugs would be identical in orbit and target mode? Because they are not in my case.