xylotism

This is pretty good advice. I try to start my burns early to make sure I don't end up finishing far too late and mess up the whole maneuver. I have a few tips though: * The maneuver reticle on your navbar adjusts on the fly. Try to match it perfectly regardless of your timing, as long as you stay on that target and deplete the delta V bar to 0m/s, you should end up at the right orbit. * For longer burns it's often more efficient to do some of the maneuver on your first orbit and do the rest on the second pass, because the farther out you start/end your burn the less fuel efficient it will be. * Turn off your SAS as the burn comes to an end, so it's easier to stay on target as the blue reticle moves. * Press X to kill throttle immediately. If you're throttled all the way up it can be hard to throttle down manually and keep the maneuver intact.

Oh good, this is how I do it, I was worried that I might be doing it wrong and wasting a lot of fuel by burning pro-target, retrograde, pro-target, retrograde, over and over until I got within docking distance.

Do you know how to use SAS/ASAS? If you made sure to include the module from the Control tab in design mode, use T to activate it in launch mode, it greatly helps with steering. If you're using SAS and it's still out of control, add some RCS fuel with RCS boosters, use R in launch mode to turn it on and SAS will use RCS thrusters to help with course correction. If none of that works, your rocket is probably not balanced properly... too top- or bottom-heavy, or needs more struts for stability. Also, make sure you're using decouplers or separators to seperate stages as the engines run dry, otherwise you're hauling dead weight for no reason.